“It was a surreal moment.”
Howard Davis Jr. was 20 years old and had only been boxing for five years when he entered the ring at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal. He was in the gold-medal match against Romania’s Simion Cutov, and on top of everything else, his mother had passed away just days prior, prompting him to consider leaving the Olympics to be at her funeral. True to the spirit that would later come to define him, every obstacle and hardship became more motivation to fight. By the time he got a chance to lay flowers on his mother’s grave, Davis had a gold medal and the Val Baker Award for the Most Outstanding Boxer of the Olympics.