Boxing may be winning the fight at Beijing

A stunning thing appears to be taking place at these Beijing Olympics. The boxing tournament may actually be legitimate.

There are four days left in the event, enough time for things to unravel and get back to normal. But for now, indications are that an Olympic sport that has been, for some time now, either fixed or stupid or combinations of both, is actually attempting to reform itself.

The seminal moment, of course, was the night U.S. light-middleweight Roy Jones Jr. lost to Korea's Park Si-hun in Seoul in 1988. The decision was so blatantly wrong that whatever credibility Olympic boxing had, it lost right there.

There have been several versions of what happened that night, including one told here Monday night by the venerable Jimmy Magee, who has broadcast every Olympic boxing event for national television in Ireland since the '68 Games in Mexico City.

"I started when I was 4 years old," said Magee, 73.

Because the Irish never exaggerate, his story must be taken as gospel.

"There were five judges in those days," Magee said. "All five vote, off their score sheets, as to who won, and you needed at least three votes to win. That night, the Korean got three and so the jury questioned the judges. The judge from Morocco said he had given it to the Korean because he didn't want the home country to get a whitewash, a 5-0 decision. Turns out, two other judges had done the same thing."

Boxing and Anwar Chowdhry of Pakistan, the longtime president of the sport's international governing body, were under the gun to fix this. The pressure was especially acute because the International Olympic Committee had begun rounds of discussion about which sports could be cut from the Games. A few years ago, when they dropped softball and baseball, effective in the 2012 Games in London, those federations looked in dismay at the survival of boxing.

Chowdhry remained under pressure, but lasted until November 2006, when the federation (AIBA) replaced him with Ching-Kuo Wu of Taiwan. On the eve of the vote, Chowdhry, then 84 and in a wheelchair, told the Tapei Times that he had no choice but to continue running things, "because Wu doesn't know anything about boxing."

Wu won, 83-79, somewhat less than a mandate.

Talk of reform wandered from Olympiad to Olympiad. Before the 2000 Sydney Games, one of Chowdhry's vice presidents, Gafur Rakhimov of Uzbekistan, had been denied a visa to enter Australia. The Australians said he was a drug czar and crime boss. Today, he remains AIBA's executive vice president.