Reforming Boxing During the Quiescence: A Commendable Idea

With boxing currently at a standstill, now would seem to be an ideal time for the powers-that-be to initiate reforms. Something good will actually come out of the coronavirus lockdown if certain irritants are eliminated, or at least watered-down.

In May of 2018, Ted Sares conducted a survey for this site (you can find it here) in which he asked his respondents, “If you could do one thing to make boxing better, what would it be?” To no surprise, the most common response, the biggest turn-off, concerned the proliferation of title-holders.

In a perfect world, there wouldn’t be four sanctioning bodies, each with their own champions. And if, somehow, there was a way to cull the herd, the process of winnowing would logically begin with the WBA. The Panama-based organization has created a pathway to recognize as many as four champions in each weight division: a “Super” champion, a “Regular” champion, an “Interim” champion, and a “Gold” champion.

If I may digress for a minute, when I was first earning my spurs as a sportswriter, an established journalist that I respected told me that he had one iron-clad rule when interviewing a subject: Don’t Lie to Me. Yes, he knew that most of his interview subjects would have something to sell, if only an idea, or maybe an axe to grind, and that they would put a positive spin on anything controversial, and that was all okay. He wasn’t there to push back but to be the conduit through which the person being interviewed could reach a wider audience. But woe to the interviewee who lied to him.

Several years ago, Gilberto Mendoza Jr., the president of the World Boxing Association, told ESPN’s Dan Rafael that he was working to reduce the number of title-holders in each weight class. History would show that Mendoza was flat-out lying to him. Last year, the WBA added to the clutter by introducing the Gold category.

Nowadays, when referencing the WBA, Rafael uses words like wretched and putrid.

In an article that ran on April 3, Rafael’s counterpart at Yahoo, Kevin Iole, took it a step further. “The list of crimes committed by the WBA,” said Iole, “is longer than those committed by the Cosa Nostra.”

Each state boxing commission has something in their rulebook that gives them the authority to ban a boxer or entity that behaves in a way that brings discredit to the sport. The head of an important boxing commission – think Bob Bennett (Nevada), Andy Foster (California), Greg Sirb (Pennsylvania), or Ndidi Massay (New York) – would be doing boxing fans a big favor by invoking that rule to defrock the WBA, banning the organization from doing business in their state.

But that’s unrealistic. Besides regulating the sport, state boxing commissions are supposed to be engines of economic development. Kicking out the WBA would likely mean less tax money for state coffers. It’s probably a bad idea anyway. Banning the WBA would undoubtedly draw more attention to the shady practices of rival organizations, putting the sport in a harsher light. Moreover, in years past, the subordination of the WBA, notably in New York and Pennsylvania, proved to be nothing more than a power play.

If we can’t cull the herd, perhaps we can at least get all four sanctioning bodies on the same page with respect to certain practices. In his April 3 column, the aforementioned Iole opines that if each of the sanctioning bodies ranked all of the fighters in a given weight class, including the champions of other bodies, many lapsed fans would slowly drift back to the sport.

Does Tyson Fury rank among the Top 15 active heavyweights? Not according to the WBA, IBF, or WBO. On their lists, Fury is nowhere to be found. More absurdly, the WBA does not acknowledge Terence Crawford, or Errol Spence Jr, or Shawn Porter, among the sport’s top welterweights. Their welterweight champions are Manny Pacquiao (Super), Alexander Besputin (Regular), and Vergil Ortiz Jr (Gold).

If each organization ranked the champions of other bodies, and ranked them fairly, that would translate into more unification fights, reducing the number of title-holders and increasing the frequency of meaningful fights. Fewer big fights would be stalled while a champion fulfills his mandatory defense.

Iole uses the example of Gennady Golovkin’s mandatory defense of his IBF middleweight title against Poland’s obscure Kamil Szeremeta. Originally set for February, but repeatedly pushed back, it has now been signed for June 6 in Los Angeles at the Inglewood Forum (a date and venue that should be considered tentative).

Szeremeta is undefeated in 21 fights but has scored only five knockouts and he hasn’t defeated anyone of consequence unless one were to include the badly faded Kassim Ouma. Compelling Golovkin to fulfill his mandatory against an unqualified opponent, stalls the fight that everyone wants to see, the Golovkin-Alvarez rubber match…and GGG ain’t getting any younger; he turned 38 yesterday, April 8.

In recent days I have been in e-mail contact with a fellow named John, a boxing enthusiast in Baltimore. John was such a big fight fan that he used to tape the Tuesday Night and Friday Night Fights so that he could watch them when he got home from work. He’s still a fight fan, but his loyalty is wavering.

“Who drives boxing?”, asks John rhetorically. It isn’t the money men, he says, nor is it the biggest name fighter; it’s you, the fan, “the guy who takes his time to watch a fight on the weekend; the guy who talks about a boxer as if he has known him for years.”

“I really always wondered what type of fights we the fans would get if we sat out a few rounds,” says John, “especially those pay-per-view events.”

If long-time fans like John are amenable to a boycott, the sport may be in bigger trouble than we thought. But it’s not too late for the powers-that-be to mend fences and now would seem like the perfect time to get the ball rolling.

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