Amateur Career
Scully graduated from Windsor (Connecticut) High School in 1985. He began boxing in 1982 and won numerous championships at middleweight (165 pounds or 75 kilograms), including the 1987 Ohio State Fair (Columbus, Ohio), the 1987 National PAL (Jacksonville, Florida) and the 1988 Eastern U.S. Olympic Trials (Fayetteville, North Carolina).
Scully defeated World 165-pound (75 kg) Amateur Champion Darin Allen to win the Eastern Trials, future heavyweight contender Melvin Foster to win the Ohio Fair, and nationally rated Kertis Mingo at the National PAL.
Scully won Outstanding Boxer awards at both the 1987 Western Massachusetts Golden Gloves and the 1988 Eastern U.S. Olympic Trials tournaments.
In February 1988, the 5 ft 10 in (1.78 m) boxer was named to the All-Time team (in the middleweight spot), for the WM Golden Gloves in Holyoke, Massachusetts, joining fellow standouts Mike Tyson (heavyweight) and Marlon "Magic Man" Starling (honorable mention at welterweight). Scully won four straight WM Golden Gloves titles (1985–1988) and three consecutive New England Golden Gloves titles (1986–1988).
He defeated fellow future world-title challenger Joey DeGrandis to win the 1988 New England Golden Gloves championships.
Scully also advanced to the championship round of the National Golden Gloves tournament on two occasions, losing on a 3-2 split decision in 1987 at Knoxville (to Fabian Williams of Michigan) and a highly disputed 3-2 call in Omaha in 1988, to Keith Providence of New York City.
Scully also notably scored two decision victories enroute to each of those national final appearances in 1987 and 1988 over hard punching future WBC #1 Middleweight contender Lamar "Kidfire" Parks of Greenville, South Carolina.
The "Iceman" concluded his amateur career with a Bronze medal winning performance at the 1988 U.S. Olympic Trials in Concord, California, defeating # 3 ranked Joe Hill of Omaha in the quarter-finals before losing a 4-1 decision to World Champion Darin Allen of Columbus, Ohio in the semi-final rematch of their Eastern U.S. Olympic Trials final just one month earlier.
Scully turned professional with a final amateur record of 57-13 (not including two junior olympic bouts at age 15 and two exhibition matches).
Read more about this topic: Iceman John Scully
Famous quotes containing the words amateur and/or career:
“I have been reporting club meetings for four years and I am tired of hearing reviews of the books I was brought up on. I am tired of amateur performances at occasions announced to be for purposes either of enjoyment or improvement. I am tired of suffering under the pretense of acquiring culture. I am tired of hearing the word “culture” used so wantonly. I am tired of essays that let no guilty author escape quotation.”
—Josephine Woodward, U.S. author. As quoted in Everyone Was Brave, ch. 3, by William L. O’Neill (1969)
“The 19-year-old Diana ... decided to make her career that of wife. Today that can be a very, very iffy line of work.... And what sometimes happens to the women who pursue it is the best argument imaginable for teaching girls that they should always be able to take care of themselves.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)