BARCELONA ’92 OLYMPICS / DAY 6 : SAMOAN PACKS A CLUTCH PUNCH

It was like pulling out a basketball game with a late jump shot, or winning a baseball game in the ninth inning with a two-out home run.

After two rounds the other day in the Olympic boxing tournament, light-middleweight Fao Maselino of American Samoa sat on his stool, and looked at the scoreboard. He was losing on points to Japan’s Hiroshi Nagashima, 5-3.

“Fao, I don’t think you can catch up on points--you’d better try to stop him,” said Larry Ramirez of Fontana, who coaches the American Samoan team. “Don’t hold anything back.”

At the start of the third and final round, Maselino stalked Nagashima carefully, then threw a quick, powerful right that caught the Japanese boxer flush on the nose and broke it.

Stunned, with blood pouring from his nose, Nagashima staggered backward, and the referee quickly stopped the match. Maselino raised his arms in exultation and his coach tap-danced in his corner.

So how did Ramirez, an amateur boxing coach in Fontana, who was an assistant on the 1988 U.S. Olympic boxing team and is a probable candidate for head coach of the 1996 U.S. team, wind up coaching American Samoa?

“The USOC has a program where U.S. coaches can help out smaller countries with their coaching for the Olympics,” he said. “I wound up training two American Samoans, Fao, and our light-heavyweight, Mike Massoe.

“Both of them have been living at my house for nearly a year, and training at my gym. They’re both very strong kids, both hard workers, and they’re in good condition. And they both very badly want to do well here.”

Ramirez said both fighters work part time in Fontana as electrician’s helpers, and Maselino recently earned a welder’s certificate at San Bernardino Valley College.

* This a daily roundup of Olympic-related items from reporters in Barcelona from the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, Baltimore Sun and Hartford Courant, all Times-Mirror newspapers.