By STEVE BUFFERY -- Toronto Sun
  SYDNEY -- Thankfully, there were no serious injuries in the boxing ring yesterday at the Olympic Games, although Canada's Scott MacIntosh and Sakio Bika Mbah of Cameroon almost bored the crowd to death.

 For four agonizing rounds, the light-middleweights clutched, grabbed, elbowed and brawled. In the end, MacIntosh was booed out of the ring after being awarded an 8-5 points decision.

 "It was a pretty ugly fight, wasn't it?" said MacIntosh, who sported a cut under his left eye and a welt below his right. "(It was) my Olympic debut, so I wanted it to be a pretty fight. But I was fighting a tall, lanky African and that's never a pretty fight."

 FANS SCREAM, STOMP

 To say the least. And the scene outside the ring wasn't pretty either. The fans screamed and stomped their feet in displeasure at the decision. Mbah's coach, Banga Pierre Edmund, lifted his fighter's arm in mock victory for the fans, walked over to the judges table and yelled at them, and then shouted at the venue physician for wanting to check the physical condition of his man.

 "Cheat! Cheat!," the excitable Edmund screamed when asked for a comment.

 MacIntosh, a school teacher from Sydney, N.S., wasn't thrown by the crowd's reaction.

 "That's expected," he said. "He wants to street-fight in there and the crowd comes to see street fights, not chess matches. They want to see a good fight, two guys, wham-bam, and everybody falling down. That's not me. I go in there to box smart, get the W and move on.

 Mbah, 21, did set the tone of the match with his looping, wild left and right hooks, but the African scored very few clean blows on MacIntosh, save for the numerous, and supposedly illegal, shots to the back of the head.

 Astonishingly, it was MacIntosh who was penalized early in the fourth round for holding, or keeping his head low, or wearing his socks too high, or something weird like that. In any event, MacIntosh, 27, was awarded eight points for blows to Mbah's three, running Canada's boxing record at these Games to 2-1.

 "Obviously you could tell I was nervous in there," MacIntosh said.

 "He brought me down to his level, rather than me bring him up to mine. I didn't use the skills I have."

 His next fight promises to be a war, as MacIntosh will meet American Jermain Taylor. They clashed at the Olympic trials in Tampa a few months ago, with the American, who scored a spectacular knockout victory over Dimitriy Usagin of Bulgaria yesterday, earning the win.

 "I had a good fight against him in the U.S., a fight that I feel, if it was anywhere else, would have been my win," MacIntosh said. "I'm very confident going in there."