Low Blows from Munich

Convict Bobby Lee Hunter has come a long way since he fatally stabbed a man five years ago in a snack-bar scuffle in Do As You Choose Alley, a Charleston, S.C., ghetto. Sentenced to 18 years for manslaughter, he spent the first few years in prison as a sullen, scrappy teen-age con often banished to solitary confinement. Then he was encouraged to take up supervised fighting. His surliness vanished, and since 1970 little Bobby Lee has developed into the nation's best amateur flyweight boxer, with a good chance of winning a medal for the U.S. at the Olympic Games this summer in Munich.

Last week, though, Hunter suddenly seemed in danger of suffering a technical knockout from Olympic competition long before the Games started. Willi Daume, president of the Olympic Organizing Committee in Munich, said that Hunter would not be welcome at the Games because "an Olympic athlete should be an example to youth." The U.S. Olympic Committee "would be wise" not to send the 21-year-old boxer, advised Daume, a successful industrialist who played basketball for Germany at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. If Hunter did turn up, Daume added, he might run afoul of an Olympic rule on housing. Implying that Hunter might need to be billeted in a local prison, Daume noted a requirement of the Games that competitors stay in the official Olympic Village.

Daume's offhand remarks resembled a flurry of low blows. Olympic historians can recall no precedent for a ban, real or threatened, against a competitor on the grounds that he had a police record. Several U.S. sportsmen argued that Hunter, as a convict on the road to rehabilitation through sport, might set a better example to youth than some Olympic athletes who have never been in jail but are known not to be paragons of virtue.

Daume's concern about the Olympic housing rule was curious. For one thing, the rule has been broken before; in Mexico in 1968, for instance, West German Millionaire Josef Necker-mann, who won gold and silver medals in dressage, stayed at the luxurious hotel Maria Cristina. For another, it has never been the U.S. Olympic Committee's intention to house Hunter (providing he makes the team) behind bars. In the past year, Hunter has represented the U.S. in Colombia, Britain and the Soviet Union without being locked up in local jails between bouts. South Carolina's Manning Correctional Institution requires only that Hunter be accompanied by a guard, who in fact has become a friend, adviser and occasional corner man.

Clifford Buck, chairman of the U.S.

Olympic Committee, also seemed to be in Hunter's corner last week. "We believe that it is our prerogative to decide who goes to the Games," he told TIME Reporter-Researcher Kathleen Cooil. "If Hunter qualifies at the U.S. boxing trials next month, he will go to Munich and stay with the rest of the team at Olympic Village."

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