January 2002 - July 2006 - The Jerry Quarry Foundation

organizations, the Ali Act implicitly recognizes these same organizations’
legitimacy; it says, for example, that a promoter cannot require future options
from a boxer who is fighting in “a mandatory bout under the rules of a
sanctioning organization.” And while recognizing that professional boxing, alone
among the major sports, “operates without any private sector association,
league, or centralized industry organization,” and that weak state commissions
are exploited by less-than-honest promoters, it nevertheless posits that state
commissions are “the proper regulators of professional boxing
events.”Proposed legislation in the form of the Professional Boxing
Amendments Act of 2004 and then the Professional Boxing Amendments Act of 2005
sought to rectify this latter problem by creating the United States Boxing
Commission, a federal commission under the auspices of the Department of
Commerce. But for two years running the legislation did not receive the
necessary votes in Congress to become law, in part because a number of
congressmen who received monies from promoters like King and Arum voted against
the bills.The Professional Boxing Amendments Act would have created the
United States Boxing Commission, a national commission responsible for
protecting “the health, safety, and general interests of boxers” and for
ensuring “uniformity, fairness, and integrity in professional boxing.”
Specifically, it would have been the job of the USBC to “promulgate uniform
standards for professional boxing,” “oversee all professional boxing matches in
the United States,” and “establish and maintain uniform minimum health and
safety standards for professional boxing.” This would include the establishment
of a medical registry which would maintain “comprehensive medical records and
medical denials or suspensions for every professional boxer.” The creation of a
central commission and of uniform standards would have been a positive step
forward for boxing. If implemented successfully, it would have meant that boxing
in the United States would have been run in large part by a single set of rules,
it would have ended the practice of shopping for weak state commissions to hold
certain fights, and it would have prevented a boxer denied a license in one
state because he was not medically fit to compete from securing a license in a
different state. In bringing some uniformity and consistency to the sport, the
law would have brought a legitimacy to the business of boxing which is presently
missing.But the proposed law did not go far enough, and for that reason
it may be a good thing that the bill did not garner the necessary votes. Even
while it sought to create a new governing body for boxing, the United States
Boxing Commission, it would have left in place existing organizations which we
already know do not work.Boxing guru Cus D’Amato famously said, “People
who are born round don’t die square.” That goes for sanctioning organizations
and state commissions as well. The sanctioning organizations have a long history
of manipulating ratings, favoring promoters with whom they have a relationship
(Don King comes quickly to mind), and putting greed far ahead of integrity – all
of which add up to the boxer, the “exploited worker,” to borrow Jack Newfield’s
description of the fighter in his penetrating piece “The Shame of Boxing,”
getting less than fair treatment. So the law’s mandate that the Commission
develop guidelines for rating fighters and that the sanctioning organizations
follow these guidelines would leave in place exactly what is wrong with boxing.
It would leave in place organizations like the IBF, which was exposed in a 2000
federal trial for its long-standing practice of accepting bribes to rig its
ratings. Despite the exposure of this rampant corruption and despite the
appointment of a federal monitor who oversaw the IBF for several years, little
has changed.According to the IBF’s ratings criteria, which state that a
boxer who beats a higher-ranked boxer “will take the position of the higher
rated fighter,” Carlos Baldomir’s recent victory over IBF champion Zab Judah
should have made him the new IBF champion. But the IBF, true to its corrupt
form, chose to ignore its own published criteria and left Judah with its
worthless title. Appropriately for an organization with no true standards, it