Alright, so we pretty much bombed at Golden Gloves. My only real comfort was that everyone my guys lost to (and in one case "lost" to), went on to win their division. But that's not much of a comfort. I kind of sensed things might go awry within the last week and a half before the tournament. Behavior got weird, they almost appeared much more nervous even than last year. It kind of proved to be applicable, though, the field this year was much deeper than last year's, and the competition better with few exceptions.
Loco didn't even fight. In our sparring weeks he got an orbital fracture from an accidentally perfectly-placed right hand. Sucks, too, because he is MUCH better than the guys there at 165. Bleu and Daijon both had similar mishaps in their bouts, but manifesting in different ways. Bleu has been having a rough time in competition for a while now because once he got his first loss, mentally he seemed to acquiesce to the notion of losing. Thus, he'd put in half-efforts in competition while in the Gym he's much more focused and sharp. Then pair that with a fear of BEING a Gym-fighter and you have a guy who somewhere deep down already thinks of himself as exactly that. The kid he fought was tough. And landed a couple of well-timed overhand rights. Bleu does away with our strategy and starts bombing single punches, fighting the other kid's fight on the inside to the point of fatigue. Ref ended up stopping it in the 3rd due to the fatigue, defending but not returning punches. It's been a daunting task trying to get this kid past this hurdle, because it's not really something experience fixes. It's all in how he views himself, and breaking a lifelong habit of self-dismissal. But I have a few ideas on what to do from here. He's only at the 10 fight mark.
Joseph did better. But his fight set a tone in the whole damn tournament. I'll touch on that later. The thing that sucked about him is he missed his weight division by 2lbs. This is because in the second week out before the tournament he went a bit overboard, then had to cut too much too fast the week of. Some of these kids get happy when their cutting is going smoothly, and fuck it up with a single day. But, it didn't effect his performance. One thing about that kid is he can defend himself with anyone up to middleweights. Here's that bout (I didn't get Bleu's because I was so busy warming he and Joseph up back-to-back because they fought one right after the other, I didn't have time to find someone to record it):
I felt Joseph got the better of the last 2 rounds. His opponent wasn't landing anything clean, was getting hit with clean counters, and wasn't controlling the pace. Joseph was told by a lot of people they felt he should have gotten the nod.
Then there was Daijon. This was probably the low-point of the entire day, though in retrospect, it worked out for the better. I'm not sure I'd have realized what I did had it gone well. But he was in a very highly-anticipated first bout. It was being talked about in a couple of Gyms. Now as most of you know Daijon has been an in-depth project of human repair and refinement. I mean, truthfully they all are, but he had a lot of particular mental and emotional vulnerabilities that showed-up in the ring, where a kid like Joseph is good at hiding his. For some reason in his fight, he mentally came apart and had LONG spells of just not throwing. When he did attack or counter, it was CLEAR he was the better man:
Yeah, it just looked like he woke up that morning thinking: "Welp, gonna let this guy win today!" It occurred to me that he often does the same thing sparring with Flash. In retrospect, I know what it is. At the event he told me after the first round he "wasn't feelin' it"...to which this week in the Gym I told them all if I ever hear that between a round again, I'm stopping the bout. In any other Sport you say some shit like that you get benched. I won't have a guy half-fighting beyond making that sort of statement. But what hit me was that he was frustrated, and that in the face of frustration he shuts down. What frustrated him was Vargas' (yes, THAT Vargas, Fernando Jr.) in-ring behavior...mainly the holding and hitting, and the fact that the ref kept warning Daijon for things verbally. It's hard to detect his level of frustration in the middle of a fight because he never says anything. Like in life, he doesn't talk about his problems a lot. But in reviewing the fight it jumped out, and I thought about every instance it's happened. Arguing with refs in other fights (almost cost him that title in Cali). He has a TKO loss on his record because 20 seconds into a fight his opponent tapped him while standing on his foot and he went down. But the trip was obvious. The ref counted him anyway and he made an exasperated gesture...so the ref stopped the fight. I'd never yelled in a competition until that day. Then the same ref threatened Flash in the next fight for no reason. In the Gym he gets frustrated easily by feeling things are unfair, or when a fighter tries to make a fight messy instead of just "boxing with him"...and acts like refusing to participate should make things fall into place. That's what needs to be fixed, him waiting on that shit to happen instead of being assertive.
So we're pushing forward, working on these things. Daijon and Joseph are fighting again next Saturday. They chose to. Initially I wanted both Bleu and Daijon to take a week off. But they all requested not to and only took a couple of days.
Merqui's 108lb'er also lost to a kid who used to train here, who also won his division. And we had another very talented Amateur Dustin Somera who got DQ'd on the scale. Couldn't drop .4lbs after 3 tries. But he did the same thing Joseph did, with about a week out indulged in stuff he wasn't supposed to, then had to lose too much too fast the week of. He made the weight the first day and won his bout handily, but couldn't make it the next day.
The one saving grace was our little Brazilian Vini. Brought us home a title and will be going to regionals next month:
However, earlier I spoke of that trend Joseph's fight set. Well, Vini is the ONLY guy in the whole tournament who won going backwards. Every other fighter that went backwards lost, despite if they out-threw and out-landed the opponent. And a couple of the decisions were REALLY bad. Here in Vegas people tend to blame the Gym that runs the commission, but I realized that's not always the case because one of the robberies went to a guy they don't like. I realized it's incompetent judging. Scoring punches blocked, and scoring walking forward regardless of if it means the aggressor is GETTING hit. This is something I'm going to be speaking to a lot of people about, because while I understand these people are volunteers and do it out of the kindness of their hearts, they don't know how to WATCH boxing.
Ah well, let's end with a smile here's another video of my kid:
