Contender Boxing series - a godsend

The Wray and Nephew Contender series which had its inaugural season in 2011, has been a godsend for boxing in Jamaica. Once a thriving sport with boxers attending major games such as the CAC, Pan American and Olympic games, the sport had been on the wane....but then came the Wray & Nephew Contender series.
Since 2011, promoters have sprung up from the woodworks, some signing boxers who graduated from the Contender series to contracts that boxers such as Sakima Mullings and Devon Moncrieffe would not otherwise dream of locally.
         

But there remains that gap between the amateurs and the professionals and it is that gap that we wish to address and invite the Jamaica Boxing Board to take stock
            

We have developed home grown talents such as the great Percy Hayles, Bunny Grant, Mike McCallum, Michael Dewar and the inimitable Richard "Shrimpy" Clarke who all performed up to world class level.
We must go back to basics and develop and sustain the amateurs, from where the champions of the future are supposedly born.
          

Bunny Grant won the Commonwealth title in 1962, Percy Hayles was Tiger, Mike McCallum won  multiple medals from the CAC up to the Pan American level and of course, who can forget the Olympics when McCallum was robbed blindly by the officials in a poor decision, officials whom the IOC would ban for life from officiating in any other staging of the Olympic Games .
     

Those were the heady days of organised amateur boxing and this must be the focus of the Boxing Board. We must discover and properly prepare for our own national Championships, Caribbean Championships, and then move our amateurs through the ranks of CAC, Pan American and Olympics....ensure they have enough quality fights at the amateur level before becoming professionals, where their skills are honed to fight for world titles.
 

We have had many champions, McCallum the only home grown talent, had to go to the United States under tough circumstances to fight his way up the ranks and get his chance to become world a champion. 

We have had other world Champions -  Simon Brown, Lloyd Honeyghan, Trevor Berbick, Donovan Razor Ruddock (Canadian champion)  and Lennox Lewis...but these fighters have Jamaican connections, rather than coming through the ranks in Jamaica.
            

Nicholas The Axeman Walters follows closely in the mold of a Mccallum...a locally bred talent who still had to leave Jamaica in order to fight for a world title.
            

So while we celebrate this shot in the arm for boxing through the Contender Series, let's not forget first principles, that of the Jamaica Boxing Board having responsibilty for the sustained development of