A fistful of knowledge

Rhode Island boxer grows into an Olympic favorite

His epiphany - yes, welterweights have epiphanies without being knocked out - came in Moscow three years ago. Demetrius Andrade was 17 then, making his World Cup debut. His Belarussian opponent was 29. "I was like, 'This is not a game no more,' " he remembers.

Andrade - "Boo Boo" to family and friends - took a licking that day, and another one the next day from a Russian.

"I didn't know what was going on," acknowledges the 6-foot southpaw from Providence. "I didn't know anything. I went out there and it was a whole 'nother world."

Since then, Andrade has gotten his PhD in international amateur boxing. He has fought in Hungary, Azerbaijan, Venezuela, Brazil. He has learned what the judges can see and what they can't - and what they don't see that they should. He has had a hemispheric gold medal slip away in the final seconds of a bout that he thought he had won. He essentially had to make the Olympic team twice. And along the way, he picked up a world title.

"You've got to grow up fast, and sometimes growing up fast is good," says Andrade, who is favored to become the first American to win the Olympic welterweight title since Mark Breland in 1984 and the first to do it at a non-boycotted Games since Edward Flynn in 1932. "I can't be no little kid no more. I've gotta be a grown man."

Andrade was just a kid when he first stepped into the ring, 6 years old and too aggressive for karate. By the time he got to Hope High School, he had to make a choice. Did he want to keep playing football, where he was a promising running back? Or stick with boxing?

"One or the other," said his father, Paul, who still coaches Andrade at the 401 Boxing Club in Cranston, R.I., along with David Keefe. So Demetrius opted for the ring.

"It's a one-man sport," he concluded. "Who's better than the other man?"

Once he began winning Junior Olympic and Silver Gloves titles, Andrade realized he had the goods to get to the Games.

"I'm like, 'Wow, I can make it,' " he says. " 'I can beat everybody and I'm only 16 and the Olympics is just four years away.' "

Once he won his first US title in 2005 and got his first overseas ticket, Andrade realized he was on his own. "All right, you've got to pay attention," he told himself in the airport en route to Budapest for a dual with the Hungarians. "Look at the monitors. You don't want to miss that plane."

Miss the plane, give your opponent a walkover halfway around the world, and you let your country down. Committing pugilism for Uncle Sam brings a new set of responsibilities.

"You are an ambassador for your country," Andrade quickly understood. "I can't be out here acting the fool. I've got to change everything up. It's time to be a man."

Up against men with years of experience on him, Andrade had to change his teenaged boxing style, too. "Four years ago I was wild, all over the place," he acknowledged. He became more patient, more deliberate, more calculating.

"The first two rounds, I like to wear you down," he says. "I'm not chasing nobody, I'm going to the body, I'm blocking, I'm moving. And in the third and fourth round, that's when I start picking it up and getting my points."

In amateur boxing, where knockouts are relatively rare at the elite level, scoring punches are everything - but you have to make them obvious.

"They've got to be the punches that snap the head back or make them say, 'Whoa!' if you hit him in the body," Andrade says. "It's all about angles, too. If I get an angle and I pop him, even if his head don't go back, everybody sees it. You want to be in the middle of the ring because there are judges on all sides. If I'm against the ropes and I'm punching, the judges aren't going to see what's going on."

The higher the stakes, the lower the scores, the more precious the points, and the more reluctant fighters are to leave their fates up to the whims of the judges. Andrade learned that lesson painfully at last year's Pan American Games in Rio de Janeiro, where he lost the gold medal by a point to homeboy Pedro Lima in front of a hostile crowd.

Andrade fought his usual style, picking up the pace as the match wore on.

"But I wasn't getting my points," he discovered. "I felt like I was hitting him with clean shots that I didn't get credit for."

Finally, with a minute left, Andrade edged ahead by a point, but ended up losing after Lima hit him with a couple of shots as the referee was ordering them to break.

"I thought, 'Wow, what happened?' " Andrade recalls. "Usually when I get robbed or the judging ain't fair, I don't get upset. But that night, I was upset. I was like, 'This ain't going to happen again.' "

At the Olympic trials a month later, Andrade left nothing to chance, knocking out his first two opponents, then outpointing Keith Thurman by a 48-26 aggregate in their two bouts. That earned him a spot on the team, but Andrade still had to qualify in the weight class at last October's world championships in Chicago.

"I thought, I just beat everybody," Andrade says. "Now, I've got to beat the people from overseas. How is that going to work out?" All Andrade had to do was reach the quarterfinals to get to Beijing, but he tore up the field, winning by counts like 19-3, 26-6, and 30-9, despite fighting with impacted wisdom teeth.

His final against Thailand's Non Boonjumnong is a YouTube masterpiece, a flurry of Boo Boo blows that came so quickly the scoreboard barely could keep pace. Andrade, who stunned his man for an early 8-count, was up, 10-1, after one round and won on a stoppage just before the end of the second.

Taken with another gold from flyweight Rau'shee Warren, the sole Athens holdover, it marked the best global showing by the Yanks in eight years.

"People have started to take notice," Andrade says.

The Games are for boxing's worldly, and Andrade feels he belongs there now. The wide-eyed, wild-punching teenager has turned into a seasoned grownup with a year-old daughter back in Rhode Island whom he sees whenever he gets a break from the team's full-time residence camp in Colorado Springs.

Andrade hasn't been to college yet, but what he's learned so far appears in no formal curriculum.

"I've wised up," he says. "I've learned things that some people can't learn. The world is small, but the world is also big. There's a lot of things to learn, knowing how to do things the right way. Just life itself."