On January 16, 1920, the Eighteenth Amendment caused into effect the Volstead Act—named for its author Minnesota Senator Andrew Volstead—which prohibited the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within the United States and all territories subject to its jurisdiction.
For 13 years alcoholic beverages were prohibited in the United States, leaving countless numbers of Americans jobless; turning once law-abiding saloonkeepers into criminals, forced to operate underground in illegal speakeasies; and essentially creating bootlegging, the newest and biggest money-making venture for the mob. Could boxing one day become the next Prohibition?
If you stop and think about it for a minute, the thought is not too far-fetched. Boxing abolitionists have screamed for decades for its ban. Will the sport’s few honorable boxing promoters one day be replaced by new-age Al Capones, promoting this noble sport in illegal underground matches with even less effective governing than currently exists? Will boxing one day become organized crime’s biggest money-maker, throwing the sport completely back into their nefarious hands once again?
Some will say these words sound like that of a Hollywood movie; but I don’t think boxing prohibition is that unimaginable if we, the boxing fans, don’t start doing our part to clean up the sport. Boxing fans are the people who pay for boxing, not the promoters or television networks like HBO and Showtime.
Our dollars pay for the tickets bought at every boxing event and the fights shown on cable channels through our cable subscriptions and pay-per-view purchases, which have now become outrageously expensive. Until we finally put our collective foot down and say we’re not going to take this anymore, things will never completely change in the great sport of boxing.
I applaud the continuing efforts of Senator John McCain (R-AZ) and his sponsoring of the Professional Boxing Amendments Act of 2005 and the inevitable creation of the United States Boxing Commission. This is long overdue and the only real hope of protecting the integrity of boxing and its fighters. But there’s so much more to be done.
I believe we need complete dissolution of all the current ABC organizations that enable the infection and corruption of boxing and cause us to now sit with multiple champions instead of one in every weight division, confusing the general public and turning the sport into a soap opera, verging on the comedic likes of the WWF.
The public at large will never again place their complete faith and trust in a boxing world champion until this is done and we’re back to having only one champion in every weight division. The public is so confused as to who the real champion is anymore they no longer care, convinced they’ve got to be a math whiz just to keep track of them all.
The state of affairs in boxing has become completely ridiculous; and the public is far from convinced that these champions are truly the best in the sport, but merely fighters who’ve won their crowns through behind-the-scenes double-dealing while the better fighters are left out in the cold as a result of dishonest financial wrangling. Whether this is true or not isn’t the issue; the fact that this is how a large part of the public perceives the situation is the issue. Nothing has ever needed a Rickie Lake makeover as much as boxing.
More times than not, perception is reality for those who fork over their hard-earned dollars to see blatant mismatches and “championship” fights end in the most disgraceful ways, fought by fighters they feel are far from the sport’s best. The sport of boxing desperately needs to regain the faith of the public at large or it’s doomed; and anyone who doesn’t believe that is kidding themselves or has their own agenda.
With the dissolution of the current ABC organizations and the existence of a strong United States Boxing Commission, there would be no more rankings manipulations from one sanctioning body to the next because those sanctioning bodies would no longer exist; and the public would finally have full faith that those top contenders below the one champion in each weight class were legitimate contenders because we watched them fight each other to get there, the only way they deserve to be there.
And the constant practice of stepping over legitimate contenders to fight bums for easy paydays, leaving deserving contenders empty-handed, needs to stop; and any champion who even thinks about it should be stripped of his title. The days of champs ducking everyone in sight while we pay to watch them fight manufactured top-ten contenders must end. It’s not fair to the fighters who work hard for a shot at the title and it’s sure as Hell not fair to the public.
Only then are we assured that the champion is fighting the boxers that he should be fighting and that only true contenders are moving up the rankings fairly and getting their shot at the title they deserve. This is the only way that we’re guaranteed of seeing legitimate fights between real champions and real contenders in quality matches, assuring us of a bona fide world champion in the end.
This is the only way casual boxing fans will ever regain faith in the legitimacy of a sport that’s for a long time now considered as being fake by a large majority of the public. Without this, how will the sport continue to draw new fans and thereby continue to thrive? Will the sport of boxing ever gain total respect as a legitimate sport in the United States and the world over?
I’m tired of paying for expensive pay-per-view fights that barely deserve to be on free television. Prominent boxing writer Tom Donelson recently criticized the merits of the Monte Barrett/Hasim Rahman fight being on pay-per-view. I couldn’t agree more; but many people will still order the fight because they love the sport so much and want to see boxing. But our misguided love for the sport is what’s preventing change, like the mother of a drug addict who continues to bail her child out of jail each time he’s arrested for drug possession. That love only keeps the monster running amok.
Our enabling of boxing promoters and television networks to continue feeding us substandard fights and their often shocking results is our own fault. All we have to do is stop paying for it; then they’ll have no choice but to make the changes that we as the true supporters of boxing demand. Will the promoters of the future such as Oscar De La Hoya learn from boxing’s often seedy past and become the new white knights we so desperately need or succumb to the evils of the almighty dollar and become the same dark ogres they’ve replaced?
We constantly bash promoters like Don King and Bob Arum, yet we’re the ones who keep them in business by purchasing shoddy fights in a system that no longer makes sense. Bob Arum and Don King are successful businessmen and they’ll do whatever it takes to remain successful, just like any other businessman in any other industry. But most other industries have concrete laws and rules that are carved in stone in black and white, unlike boxing where the rules and laws are sometimes as cryptic as the hieroglyphics in the tombs of Egyptian Pharaohs.
When will boxing finally have rock-solid rules, top to bottom, from which there can be no deviation, finally providing a level playing field for all up-and-coming fighters? Or do we continue to pay to see more undeserving boxers on television simply because they’re willing to go along with the promoter’s flow just to get somewhere in the sport, leaving more deserving fighters reduced to sparring partners because they refused to be abused? This alone erodes the very foundation of public trust in the sport of boxing.
We, the fans, must finally demand that this old system be burnt to the ground and a new, fairer and more honest system take its place. We’re the only ones who can make this happen because we’re the ones who pay for boxing. If we’d all just finally say, “We’re fed up and we’re not going to take it anymore; and we’re no longer going to shell out our hard-earned dollars for junk fights with champions who really haven’t proven to us that they truly are the champions of the world,” then things would have to change. Without our dollars the sport of boxing is over, plain and simple.
But like an alcoholic or drug addict, we keep repeating the same mistakes expecting a different result by paying for these kinds of fights and allowing this outdated system that turns the sport into a joke to continue existing. Only we can change it; but we sit around and do nothing but complain and continue to fill the coffers of greedy promoters and television networks by paying an estimated $34.95 for a fight like Rahman/Barrett that should be on free television.
This same argument applies to the Shannon Briggs/Ray Mercer fight for which we’re also expected to shell out pay-per-view money this month. Showtime officials, shame on you for expecting us to pay this kind of money for these 2 fights that are far from being pay-per-view level. Enough’s enough.
There’s a serious need for a better system that protects these great warriors who put their lives on the line to entertain us. There needs to be stronger regulations for boxing promoters, including background checks, so we can get rid of the bad elements that unfairly control a large part of this sport as it stands today.
Will there ever come a day when the rights and needs of the fighter comes first, giving them the protection they deserve? We sometimes seem to forget who’s taking the beating in the ring. I don’t see the promoters or television executives in the ring getting punched silly.
Will these great gladiators ever be treated with the same fairness and protection that athletes in every other sport enjoy? The lack of all of these things is what still has many convinced that boxing still lives in the dark ages of old and every fight with a bad ending is fixed, robbing the sport of any legitimacy and integrity at all.
We must demand change in the sport of boxing and we must begin today or its demise is imminent. We’re kidding ourselves to think that we can continue on with deaths in the ring that might’ve been prevented in a sport run without a national governing body with rules that are easily manipulated by wealthy promoters in an antiquated system featuring too many champions, many of whom are virtually unknown to the general public.
Do we wait until the champions of the world are reduced to criminals just so they can make a living, fighting in illegal underground matches run by organized crime; where death rates in the ring are soaring through the roof because of no supervision at all, before we finally demand that this sport be cleaned up once and for all? Do we wait until the world can no longer watch boxing on television because it’s been banned by every civilized country on the planet? We need to wake up and complain less and act more.
I don’t consider myself some kind of Nostradamus, but I am smart enough to see the writing on the wall; and if the boxing fans of the world don’t start forcing change soon, the most relevant word in the writing that’s splattered across that wall in the blood, sweat and tears of every fighter on this planet is prohibition.
For comments about this article, you can email Mark Workman at boxingmarkva@aol.com .
