Belts for Everyone: Ted Cruz’s Ali Act Keeps Titles Unlimited

By Boxing Insider Staff

Fans asking what the new Ali Act bill does about boxing’s four belts, the interim titles, and the alphabet champions now have a clear answer: nothing.

The Senate version introduced Thursday by Sens. Ted Cruz and Jacky Rosen removes the title reform that was in the House bill, and understanding what happened requires walking through what has actually governed the belts, era by era. It is a shorter story than most fans think.

The original Ali Act, passed in 2000 and still the law today, never limited titles. What it requires from sanctioning organizations is paperwork and transparency: file their ratings criteria with the FTC, explain a rating change when a fighter asks, maintain an appeals process, and disclose their fees. It says nothing about how many champions an organization can crown.

Every WBA regular championship, every WBC franchise designation, every interim belt of the past 25 years was created legally under that law. The four-belt era is not a violation of the Ali Act. It grew up inside it.

John McCain tried a different approach. His Professional Boxing Amendment Act passed the Senate unanimously in 2004 and again in 2005. It did not limit how many titles an organization could crown, but it would have put the sanctioning bodies under federal supervision for the first time: every organization would have needed a license from a United States Boxing Commission to sanction fights in America, revocable for violations, and would have followed federal ratings guidelines, with every rating change published and explained to the public and the commission. Break the rules, lose the right to do business in the United States. The House never voted on it, and the idea died, as this series detailed this week.

Then came this year’s House bill, passed in March, which was the first federal text ever to address the titles head on. One champion per weight class, per organization. Interim titles only when a champion is genuinely unavailable. Had it become law as written, the regular championships, the franchise designations, and most of the sport’s interim belts would not have been permitted. Four champions per division, one per organization, maximum.

Understand why that provision was existential for the four organizations, because it is not complicated. Sanctioning fees follow titles. Every championship an organization recognizes is a fight it collects fees to sanction, and every regular, franchise, and interim designation multiplies the inventory. A federal rule cutting each organization to one champion per division does not trim their business, it eliminates most of it. The House bill was, for the sanctioning bodies, a revenue extinction event with a congressional vote already behind it. It was also the structure TKO’s own testimony argued for: Nick Khan told the Senate committee in April there should simply be 18 champions across 18 weight classes. The House text delivered exactly that. It was, on the record, the version TKO’s leadership described wanting.

The Senate text does not contain that section. Not a narrower version, not a phased-in version. It is simply not there.

The Senate bill also adds no new rules for the sanctioning bodies in its place. No ratings guidelines, no licensing, no disclosure beyond what the 2000 law already requires. The only title language in the Senate bill points the other direction: a UBO “may rely upon, utilize, or recognize titles and rankings” from outside organizations.

That clause puts no obligation on the WBC, WBA, IBF, or WBO. It creates a path for a new UBO to work with the existing belts, since a UBO that wants its champion recognized as undisputed would need them. For the four organizations, the practical result of the Senate draft is that nothing changes, and a potential new line of business opens.

Here is the measure of how well they did. Compare what each faction got between the House version and the Senate version. TKO, the company that lobbied hardest for this bill, actually absorbed tighter rules in the rewrite: the Senate added a three year cap on first contracts, tripled the negotiation window from 30 to 90 days, restored a firewall between UBOs and managers, and moved doping penalties out of UBO hands. The sanctioning bodies got an entire section erased. The sanctioning bodies extracted a bigger change between drafts than the company with the Washington firm on retainer, and how becomes clear below, from Sulaimán himself.

What makes the deletion notable is how much of the case against the current title structure was made, on the record, in the same room this bill came from. Cruz said at the April hearing that multiple simultaneous champions make the sport harder to follow and harder to know who is truly the best, and the committee’s own fact sheet lists competing rankings, multiple belts, and excessive interim titles as the first problem the legislation exists to solve.

The strongest testimony came from Khan, the WWE president and TKO board member helping lead Zuffa Boxing. He told the committee the sanctioning bodies’ business model is “charging boxers money for the right to be called champions,” that the WBC alone recognizes 163 champions across 18 weight classes, and that rankings have been manipulated, “arbitrary at best, but more often, downright crooked.” He described the WBC stripping Terence Crawford of the undisputed super middleweight championship over a $300,000 sanctioning fee, and the IBF stripping Jai Opetaia after its president felt slighted at a press conference.

That was April. The bill that arrived in July contains no provision on any of it, and the response from TKO tells you what mattered most. Dana White and Khan issued statements supporting the Senate version the morning it was introduced, title reform gone and all. Read those two facts together: the company argued for 18 champions in April and endorsed unlimited champions in July. The title cleanup was negotiable. The UBO structure, the piece that lets Zuffa run its own championships under federal blessing, was the prize, and TKO was plainly willing to deal away the rest of the reform to secure it.

And now the first reaction from the four organizations is in, and the arc of Mauricio Sulaimán’s own words tells the story. In April, as the bill moved, the WBC president said of Zuffa: “They’re coming in so aggressively and so arrogant,” he told Ring Champions. By May, with the fight at full heat, he told IFL TV, “They are the ones that came attacking like a mad dog,” adding: “We have no issues. We’re very happy. Look where we are.” When Nick Khan aired his grievances about WBC fees and demands, Sulaimán answered point by point, calling the portrayal “such a low class action.”

This week in Las Vegas, with the Senate text public, the tone is different. Sulaimán told BoxingScene that he has had no talks with Zuffa about the Garcia-Benn card its fighter headlines for the WBC welterweight title, but that “there should not be a reason I’m not allowed into any ring.” In a companion interview with the same outlet, he said he holds “no animosity” toward Dana White, calling him a boxing man. The demonizing of the sanctioning bodies, as BoxingScene put it, now looks like bluster that has given way to operational reality: the Senate bill lets UBOs work with the four organizations and lets the bodies keep multiple champions per weight class, and a Zuffa fighter is challenging for a WBC belt in September.

And Sulaimán answered the question this article’s comparison raises. He told BoxingScene that while Zuffa lobbied politicians hard to push the bill through the House, he lobbied to protect the WBC’s cause as well. The organizations with no announced lobbying operation had one after all, run by the president himself, and between March and July it took an entire section out of a federal bill.

There is one more twist. The bill does not merely preserve the current proliferation of titles, it adds to it. A UBO by definition operates its own championship system, and Zuffa Boxing has already crowned its first champion, with Jai Opetaia wearing the inaugural Zuffa title, per BoxingScene. If the Senate version becomes law, boxing keeps every existing regular, interim, and franchise championship and gains a new set of UBO titles on top. The legislation that identified too many champions as the sport’s first problem would, as written, increase the number of champions.

So where does the title question get decided now? Reconciliation. The House passed its version with the one champion rule; the Senate version deletes it; before anything reaches the president’s desk, the two chambers must produce identical text, and the title section is now one of the clearest differences between them. There are three ways it resolves. The House accepts the Senate’s deletion, and unlimited titles become the permanent federal answer. The Senate accepts the House language, and the one champion rule comes back, which would require the sanctioning bodies to lose in a room they have so far won in. Or the provision becomes a bargaining chip traded against the other differences, the contract caps and effective dates, in a year-end negotiation most fans will never see. Amendments to the Senate bill are expected after the August recess, the Congress ends January 3, and the title question will be answered by then or the whole process starts over.

And make no mistake about whose name goes on the outcome. The 2004 and 2005 bills are remembered as the McCain bills, twenty years later, because he drafted them, championed them, and owned them, in victory through two unanimous Senate votes and in defeat when the House let them die. This is Ted Cruz’s Ali Act the same way. It was drafted under his chairmanship, shaped by his committee, introduced with his statement, and he controls what happens to it in markup and on the floor. If the belts multiply under federal blessing, if the UBO era is what boxing becomes, if the title mess this bill’s own fact sheet called problem number one outlives the bill written to solve it, that is the Cruz legacy in boxing, the way the road not taken is McCain’s.

For fans, the bottom line is this. If the Senate version becomes law, the belts continue exactly as they are: every regular, interim, and franchise title, every sanctioning fee, every ranking, governed by the same 2000 rules that produced the current landscape, with Zuffa’s new titles arriving alongside them.

And to be fair, not all belts are the enemy. A ranking title has real value: it gets a fighter rated, it gives a ten round main event stakes, and at the club level a regional belt is often the difference between a fight and an event. The NABF and its equivalents give developing fighters a ladder that means something. The problem was never that ladder. The problem is the fee system attached to the titles and a structure that multiplies champions until the word stops meaning much. That is the exact problem this bill was sold to us as solving, the first one on the committee’s own fact sheet, and it completely disappeared in the rewrite. The Senate version leaves it precisely as it found it.

BoxingInsider will report what emerges from reconciliation. Until then, if you want a Super title, a Regular title, a Gold title, a Diamond belt, a Silver belt, a Franchise belt, a Money Belt, or a belt beaded by Huichol artisans, there has never been anything in federal law stopping anyone from selling you one, and the newest bill in Congress keeps it that way.