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Battling on Boxer hopes to triumph through devastating losses
SYDNEY, Australia -- The U.S. boxers are racing through the first round, demolishing the opposition and just generally taking the lead in oddball stories, some of them ridiculous and some just heartbreaking. In this latter category is the tale of welterweight Dante Craig, a nice young kid from Cincinnati who wears a huge floral arrangement on his biceps, a tattoo that reads, "In Memory of Mary and Dante Jr. " It describes the kind of one-two punch that most boxers -- most people -- don't get up from. Indeed, the death of his mother in 1998 had Craig down and out for a year. Mary had suffered from breast cancer and her passing was hardly a surprise. Still, her loss, coupled with recent disappointments in the ring -- he had stalled out in the trials for the Atlanta Games after having won the national Golden Gloves championship in 1995 -- left him discouraged enough to give up the sport altogether. And for a while he plodded along, making $400 a week as a pants presser ("70 pants per hour"), not missing the ring at all. A year after Mary's death, Craig's brother Dion had a dream in which their mother urged Dante to get back into the gym. This was, even by the usual standards of departed ones returning with advice, pretty unusual.
"She never wanted me in the gym," Craig said. "She always was more interested in me staying in school." He added that the dream "hit me in my heart." What may have been even more persuasive, though, was Dion's insistence -- which he was willing to back up with a subsidy of $50 per week -- that Dante get back into training. Between his two advisers, one living and one not, Craig got the message. But his road back did not get easier. On the eve of the U.S. championships in January, Craig got a phone call from his girlfriend in Cincinnati that their newborn son had died of respiratory problems -- "something they got a name for." Craig pushed himself through that tournament and then the Olympic trials, where he upset two-time U.S. champion Larry Mosley to make the Olympic team. Not that there weren't further complications. Defending that spot in the qualifier in Tijuana, Craig fought four times with what coach Tom Mustin called "a gaping hole in his tooth" that would require nearly four hours of dental surgery, and a chipped bone in his hand "that took so much ice every day I'm surprised he didn't have frostbite." Says Mustin: "I don't think there's much quit in him any more." Craig had to undergo surgery for that chipped bone and also for torn ligaments in his right hand. After missing a full summer's worth of international experience, he didn't even return to sparring until two weeks before the Olympics. That didn't help his chances, especially since he'd only had six international matches total coming into the biggest tournament of his life. Last Saturday, to open the Olympic boxing, Craig tattooed Egypt's Fadel Showban Showban in a walkover 17-2, overcoming a nervous beginning to score hard and often in the end. He next fights Thursday, continuing an improbable story that, for all its horrible beginnings, could have a happy ending yet.
Sports Illustrated senior writer Richard Hoffer is in Sydney covering the Olympic boxing competition for the magazine and CNNSI.com. Check back daily to read Hoffer's behind-the-scenes reports from Down Under.
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