Howard Davis Jr., a boxer from Long Island who in 1976 won an Olympic gold medal and also received the Val Barker Trophy, awarded to the most outstanding Olympic fighter, over his teammates and fellow gold medalists Michael and Leon Spinks and Sugar Ray Leonard, died on Wednesday at his home in Plantation, Fla. He was 59.
The cause was lung cancer, according to an announcement on Facebook by the Howard Davis Jr. Foundation, which raises money to fight cancer.
Davis, who was a lightweight for most of his career and had a blistering left jab, was only 20 and was in mourning at the 1976 Games in Montreal. Days earlier, his mother, Catherine, had died of a heart attack at 37.
“I remembered her pointing her finger in my face and telling me, ‘You’d better win the gold medal,’ ” Davis told The New York Post in August. “I wasn’t going to be denied. There was no way I was going to lose.”
He soundly beat Simion Cutov of Romania for the gold medal in the lightweight division, becoming one of five Americans (along with Leonard, the Spinks brothers and Leo Randolph) who won gold that year.
“For pure ring mastery, the performance turned in by Davis against Cutov probably was the most polished of the night,” Steve Cady wrote in The New York Times. “It had skill, footwork, self-defense and, when he elected to strike, awesome power for a lightweight.”
Davis had more than 100 wins as an amateur. As a professional, he had a string of victories but lost a 1980 lightweight title bout against Jim Watt and, unlike the other 1976 gold medalists, never won a world title.
Davis said publicly that he was conflicted about the violence and injuries inherent in the sport.
“The last couple of years, there has been a rash of fatal injuries to boxers,” Davis told The New York Times in 1981. “You think about that every time you step into that ring. I see boxers get knocked out and lie there four or five minutes. It’s frightening. Even if you get paid a million and a half dollars, it’s not enough. It’s a very dangerous sport.”
After turning professional, he said he found little that he enjoyed about boxing, other than the money.
For Davis, the eldest of 10, boxing had always been a family affair. He was born on Feb. 14, 1956, in Glen Cove, N.Y., to Catherine and Howard Davis Sr., a social worker who ran a youth center and trained amateur and professional boxers, including his son.
According to a biography on the Davis foundation’s website, he was inspired to become a boxer after seeing the 1970 documentary “A.k.a. Cassius Clay” and went on to win Golden Gloves tournaments before he made it to the Olympics.
He retired from boxing in 1996 with a professional record of 36-6-1 with 14 knockouts, the foundation said.
Several years ago he began training mixed martial arts fighters, perhaps most notably Chuck Liddell. Davis and his wife, Karla, also started a mixed martial arts promotion company called Fight Time Promotions.
Besides his wife, survivors include a son, Dyah, also known as Ali; a daughter, Anika; and a brother, Kenny.
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