After having won the bronze medal at the 1986 World Amateur Boxing Championships and the 1987 Pan American Games he placed a controversial second-place finish at the 1988 United States Olympic Trials and Box-off's to the Seoul Olympics eventual Gold Medalist, Ray Mercer.
As both his mother and father are Jamaican citizens, he won the right to fight on the Jamaican Olympic Boxing Team after stopping the island nation's top amateur heavyweights in the 1988 Jamaican Olympic Trials.