April 23rd, 2007  Bochner 1st Three Category Champion  The weekend of the Ray McGibbons Gloves tournament marked two auspicious accomplishments for our Atlas boxing team.  The first and most disheartening was that all of our boxers fared poorly at this tournament, with the exception of Jonathan Bochner.  The second accomplishment being a tribute to the kind of year that Jonathan is having, by winning this tournament he became the first Atlas fighter to win three tournaments at three different weight categories.  After being robbed at the National Championships Jonathan avenged his loss to Sleeman Usmanee, winning the Final Team Selection box-offs in the 64 Kg category.  Then at the British Colombia Golden Gloves he captured the title at the 69 Kg category, also winning the prestigious Golden Boy belt for the best boxer of the tournament.  So at the Ray McGibbons Gloves Jonathan decided to enter into the 75 Kg category, he was one of 9 Atlas boxers to enter the tournament.  The first night of the tourney saw four of our fighters in the ring in final and semi-final matches.  First up for our club and for the first time in her career, Priscilla Trompowsky tied on the gloves versus Lara Tacker of the Newsgirls Boxing Club.  The first round was electric from beginning to end as Priscilla threw everything she had into one round of fury, hitting her opponent down to the body then up to the head, putting her punches together to gain a points advantage of 13-3 after the 1st round.  Never having been in a boxing match before Priscilla did a very typical thing in blowing herself out in the first round and being drained for the next round.  The 2nd round proved to be very frustrating and unfair for Priscilla who was already psyched out by being so tired, mainly because her opponent started to simply use her height to push out her long arms, keeping them constantly in our girl’s face.  This led to two unfair 8-counts which should never have been called that when the other girl was only moving her fist 2 inches with each pushing punch, but the referee thought that was enough to stop the fight in the 2nd round.  An unfair ending to what could have been an excellent win for her first tournament experience.  Next up for us on Friday was Jeff Kappes, in his third fight, in against Kwincy Athanas of Tiller’s boxing club.  The fight last the distance, and Jeff was never in any serious trouble this fight as he constantly moved away from any heated encounters, using his jab to keep his opponent at bay most of the time.  But Jeff once again focused to much on not being hit instead of actually attacking, and by the end of the fight the score read 21-7 against him.  Another Atlas fighter making his ring debut was Christian Arambullo in the 75 Kg Sub Novice category, entering the ring against Angelo Maddalena of the hosting St. Catherines boxing club.  The fight was fast and furious as both combatants exchanged punches toe to toe, with Christian definitely gaining the advantage to his natural evasion skills that kept his opponent from connecting most of the time.  After the first and second rounds the points were nearly even, with the hometown favorite up by one point after the 2nd round.  Throughout the fight Christian had been weaving out of the way of punches, but somewhat to low with his head, and had gotten himself a couple of warnings for it before the third round, including a point off in the 2nd round, but when Christian was called for it again in the final round it led to a disqualification.  The points were close right till the end, and Christian was really only guilty of trying to get out of the way a little to wildly, but he was never in trouble and put an excellent effort in with 30 points scored before the late disqualification.  Finally, the bright spot of the night, Jonathan Bochner fought the much less experienced Hosni Below of the Beaver boxing club, in his first ever tournament entry in the middleweight division.  As expected it didn’t take long for Jonathan to establish his usual fast paced attack.  Jonathan put on a boxing clinic for the young boxer on his way to an outclass victory (by 20 pts or more for open class boxers) in the 3rd round.  Jonathan was the only bright spot on what turned out to be a frustrating day for our novices.  On Saturday, the tournament had its busiest day with two sessions of fights, the first starting at 1pm and the second at 7pm, but the real battle started at the weigh-ins that morning at 8am.  First off, both James Carpio and Nathan Carncy were taken out of the tourney due to illness (flu) and then Dan Caron, our only other Open class entry, tipped the scales at 65.3 Kg, approx. 3 lbs. over the weight limit.  Dan rushed off to the sauna at the hotel to begin making weight, not to be taken lightly when 1 hour is all he had to do it in.  But after almost half an hour in the sauna doing polish round, he managed to step on the scales at exactly 64 Kg, a credit to his determination and discredit to using home scales to check your weight before tournaments.  The afternoon session had only one Atlas fighter in the ring, young Damon Mahon, making a return to the ring after a lay off of more than a year, to square off against Nathan Fitzgerald of the Bigtyme boxing club in the 52 Kg Novice final in the Cadet C category.  This fight was more shadow boxing between the two little guys as both weren’t to interested in engaging one another, but Nathan did manage to use his reach to drop the odd punch on Damon.  Damon never really got a chance to get his bearings or his balance as he chased and was chased in return across the ring, getting frustrated with his opponent’s reach advantage.  In the 2nd round the fight was stopped due to outclass (only 15 pts. more need for novices) a loss, but not one in which Damon was anywhere near in any trouble the whole fight, all in all good first fight back for Damon. That evening Dan and Jonathan were both slated to fight, but Steve Rolls of Jamestown boxing pulled out of his match with Jonathan due to personal reasons.  That left only the fight between Dan and Tony Luis of Champs Eastside boxing in Cornwall .  The fight was a travesty as they counted all of Tony’s slapping punches as scoring blows, despite the solid counter-attack from a drained Dan Caron who hadn’t fully recovered from making weight this morning.  The fight ended with a questionable outclass victory for Tony, the officials apparently scoring some of Dan’s scoring punches for Tony as Dan’s corner and our other Atlas athletes watched the computer screen in dismay.  A very disappointing result, and another frustrating loss for Dan when it wasn’t deserved, all the more reason for Dan to want to make the move toward pro boxing.  The last day of fighting began at noon on Sunday, and Atlas had four fighters in the finals of the tournament.  First up for Atlas was young Coulter Argue in the 54 Kg Novice category, facing Joey Askam of the Bramalea boxing club.  In the first round, Coulter was very aggressive and managed to land a lot of punches going up by a score of 20-13.  The second and third rounds proved that Coulter, like Priscilla, blew himself out in the first round.  The fight ended with Coulter losing by a score of 41-31, an excellent reminder that we all have to be ready to continue a fast paced fight beyond the first round, especially for Coulter who hadn’t had a fight for almost a whole year.  Next up for Atlas was Ariel Garneau, who is trained by Dan Caron at the Dunfield Club at Yonge and Eglinton.  Ariel was up against tough competition in Malinda Watpool of Tiller’s boxing club, a true middleweight who had to drop considerable weight to fight in this tournament, and Ariel was at the bottom of the category weighing in at 155 lbs.  The fight was over pretty quickly as Malinda launched a barrage of punches for the whole first minute that our girl was hard pressed to keep up with.  The judges were once again very free with their scoring of blows for this fight as our girl lost by outclass in the very first round, a disappointing result after Ariel had trained hard and wasn’t even nearly hurt or tired after the fight, but upset that the judges would so quickly score for her opponent.  The same held true in our next fight, which featured our Mark Colucci against the former 2-time Ontario Thai Boxing champion, Mohammed Awad, also from Tiller’s.  The fight saw the judges score only for Mohammed leading to a similar result for Mark as for Ariel, an outclass loss in the first round.  By this point we had realized that the judges were more interested in getting the tournament over with instead of letting the boxers display and improve their skills.  At least the tournament ended on a bright note as Jonathan took on hometown favorite middleweight Ryan Baulk of the St. Catherines boxing club.  As in his first fight, Jonathan was able to use his considerable experience and speed to quickly gain the advantage of Ryan, a veteran of only 14 fights.  By the third round Jonathan was way up on points leading to yet another outclass victory for Jonathan on his way to winning the 75 Kg category.  Jonathan was able to capture his goal of being a three category champion this year, and some of our new novices were able to get in the ring for the first time in a long time or the first time despite the disappointing results they all now know exactly what they have to work on.  Fighting in tournaments is a privilege and an honor and in order to win one must be ready, and that can only happen by training hard and with intensity in the gym and being ready to compete at club shows, both will be requirements for those who wish to enter tournaments in the future.