Stan Hamilton began boxing in his backyard with his brother and other neighborhood boys. His first punching bag was an old basketball in a burlap sack, but things began to change quickly. Stan next boxed in the Navy and following his discharge from the service began boxing in the Golden Gloves program in his hometown of Knoxville, where he won the light heavyweight championship. Soon thereafter, he earned a boxing scholarship (at that time, boxing was a NCAA sport like football and basketball) to the University of South Carolina. Following graduation, he returned to Knoxville and was asked by local organizers, if he would referee Golden Gloves tournaments. That was the start of a remarkable career as a boxing official. He went to his first national Golden Gloves tournament in Kansas City in 1964 and has refereed in all but three national tournaments since. He began refereeing AAU National Tournaments in 1963 and in 1968 took the AIBA exam in Mexico City and was elevated to Bureau status. Hamilton has received many boxing officiating honors and visited some fifty foreign countries as a boxing official. Some of these include the 1974 World Championships in Havana, Cuba; the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal; the 1979 Pan American Games and that same year Stan was voted “official of the year” by USA Boxing. In 1980 at Spartakaid in Moscow, Russia, Hamilton was voted by his peers as the “Best Amateur Boxing Official in the World.” He served on the referee and judge’s commission for the Seoul, Barcelona and Atlanta Olympic Games and in 1995 was voted into the USA Boxing Hall of Fame and the Hall of Honor for International Boxing Officials. He is a member of both the Knoxville Sports Hall of Fame and the Golden Gloves Hall of Fame.
