South African boxer a winner with repaired hand

Press, 12 July 1979, Page 17

South African boxer a winner with repaired hand

The fists of a boxer, you would think, must be utterly invulnerable. An inherent weakness in the hands would surely stifle any pretensions to fighting for the world title.

This makes last month’s performance in Monte Carlo of South Africa’s Gertie Coetzee all the more startling. In the first round, he knocked down the former world heavyweight champion Leon Spinks three times with a right hand that has twice been operated on but is so effective that the referee stopped this final eliminator for the world title after two minutes three seconds.

Coetzee broke both hands when he successfully defended his South African title two years ago by out-pointing Mike Schutte. If this demonstrated his courage it also showed a fragility which had to be rectified. Coetzee subsequently underwent operations involving the insertion of a small piece of his hip bone into his right hand and the fusing of his carpals to his metacarpals.

If you feel the back of his hand — and almost every South African in Monte Carlo that day was doing so — it is curiously irregular and thick. His right hand, in fact, is almost half an inch thicker than his left.

These operations have helped Coetzee to become at 24 perhaps his country’s most celebrated sportsman, partly because boxing is one of the few events in which South Africa can compete internationally. The need for a country deprived of Olympic participation, rugby union and cricket tests and most world championships to express its immense ability may have resulted in greater focus on those sports from which they are not barred. Jodi Scheckter of South Africa now leads the world motor racing championship and Coetzee is now set to meet the American John Tate this autumn for the World Boxing Association title which Muhammad Ali is officially renouncing. Coetzee’s victory over the 1976 Olympic lightheavyweight champion stressed one thing. “It showed that if I’d been allowed to compete I would have won the Olympic title.” South Africa's hankering for sporting idols has resulted in Coetzee being a potent expression of this desire. “A department Store be inaugurated

unless I am invited,” he says with a rare shaft of pride. He received over 6000 letters in training at San Remo and 350 South Africans made the journey to Europe. There will be 100,000 spectators in Johannesburg or Pretoria if Tate accepts an offer to meet Coetzee there. Another South African heavyweight, Kalli Knoetze, beaten by both fighters, believes it will be very close.

Tate is certainly no Ali, Frazier or Foreman. Whereas they all won Olympic titles, Tate was knocked out in the first round in 1976 by a Cuban, Teofilo Stevenson. And Tate’s subsequent professional career has not been sparkling enough to suggest that, if certainly less impressive as ’.n amateur, he may yet approach their performances as professionals.

Coetzee has a more remarkable record. At the age of nine, he knocked out a 16-year-old in his first amateur fight. Now unbeaten in 22 bouts, he noticed in the two fights with Aki that Spinks was vulnerable if his opponent

led with his right. Coetzee, six feet three inches and 221 pound, exploited this strategical appreciation with sudden force and concluded in one round what Ali laboured 30 to achieve. Coetzee, too, has a dedication rare even among heavyweights, relishing the prospect of a world title clash. He brought his pulse rate down to 48 beats per minute from 70 during his training for the Spinks fight by a punishing schedule of 350 miles of road work and 1000 rounds in the gym. A member of the Dutch Reform Church, Coetzee’s respect and quietness makes him a far more disciplined sportsman than Spinks, who has had difficulties in his private life. His father “Flip” has always had great influence over Coetzee, who still addresses anyone senior to. him as “Oom,” an Afrikaans word of respect.

For many South Africans, Coetzee is not only a sportsman but completely representative of their way of life. For them the fight against Tate cannot come a moment too soon.