Utopia and Unicorns: The Boxing We’d Have If John McCain and Mullin Had Won their Ali Bills

By Larry Goldberg

This is a fantasy column, a utopia-and-unicorns piece, except for one thing: every sentence in it describes legislation that actually passed a chamber of Congress or drew more than 50 co-sponsors. Nothing below was impossible. All of it was on the table, voted on, and inches from the president’s desk. So indulge the exercise. Here is the boxing we would have today if the bills had gone the other way.

Start in 2005. John McCain’s Professional Boxing Amendment Act has passed the Senate unanimously, twice, and in this timeline the House takes the vote it never took in ours. The United States Boxing Commission opens its doors in 2006.

Every promoter in America now holds a federal license. So does every manager and every sanctioning body, and the license can be pulled for breaking the rules. The commission publishes federal ratings guidelines, and when an organization moves a fighter in its rankings, the change is published and explained, in writing, to the public. The alphabet organizations still exist, still sanction fights, still collect their fees. They just do it under supervision, the way every other billion-dollar activity in the country does.

And here is what nobody predicts in 2006: the sanctioning bodies come out of it stronger. Twenty years of published criteria and explained rankings, and the belts mean something again, because a WBC title in this timeline carries a paper trail anyone can read. The fee structure survives; the mystery around it does not. The organizations that spent our timeline defending their credibility spend this one accumulating it, and when fans in this world argue about rankings, they argue about published criteria instead of conspiracy theories. Supervision, it turns out, was the best branding the belts ever got.

And one database opens: every professional fighter in America, one file each. Record, knockouts, suspensions, medicals. A fighter suspended in Ohio on Saturday cannot be licensed in Missouri on Monday, because the Missouri commission sees the suspension before it sees the license fee. Commission shopping, the sport’s oldest trick, dies in the Bush administration. The end of Mike Tyson’s career, which in our timeline toured the jurisdictions that would still have him, plays out differently in this one, because there are no longer jurisdictions that ask no questions. There is one set of questions, everywhere.

Think about who else that file protects. In our timeline, every fight town has him: the opponent who is 0-16, who has been stopped in half of them, who keeps getting licensed because each state sees only the fee in front of it. In this timeline his file follows him, and somewhere around the sixth knockout, a commission doctor looks at the whole picture and the whole picture says enough. He does not vanish from boxing; he gets steered to the gym jobs, the corner work, the life after fighting that our timeline lets him postpone one paycheck at a time until there is nothing left to protect. The registry does not just catch cheaters. It catches the men the sport uses up.

Now it is November 2013, and Magomed Abdusalamov is fighting at Madison Square Garden. In our timeline, that night ended with a $22 million settlement and a rebuilt New York protocol, written in hindsight. In this one, the federal fight-night standards have been national for seven years: the dedicated ambulance, the designated trauma hospital, the post-bout observation rules. Maybe the outcome is the same, because boxing is boxing and no rule erases its risk. But the system built to catch that night exists in all 50 states, not just the one that learned it the hard way afterward.

And in this timeline, the quiet saves pile up where nobody writes headlines. Baseline scans find cysts and conditions nobody knew existed, get fighters into treatment, stop damaged men from taking more. In our America, that only happens in five states. In this one it happens everywhere, for twenty years, and the fighters walking around today because a scan in Tulsa or Tampa caught something early are the whole argument, invisible precisely because the system worked.

Now it is 2017, and in this timeline Markwayne Mullin’s Muhammad Ali Expansion Act gets its floor vote. The word “boxer” in federal law becomes the word “fighter,” covering every combat sports athlete a state commission licenses. The cage gets the medical floor. Bare knuckle, when it arrives a year later, is born covered. The two-rulebook company is never possible, because there is only one rulebook. A fighter who fails a brain scan in this America does not switch sports; there is no sport to switch to where nobody looks.

And at the club level, the math changes in the best way. In this timeline, a promoter licensed after the pandemic and running shows in Times Square is not competing against jurisdictions that ask for nothing; every promoter in every state carries the same floor, so nobody gets underpriced by underprotecting fighters. The B-sides arrive with files: imaging history, real records, suspensions visible. No crapshoot at the imaging center, no card blown up two weeks out by a scan nobody saw coming. The strict states in our timeline are islands. In this one, they are just the country.

And here is the part worth sitting with: in this timeline, does the UBO debate of 2026 even happen? The case for the UBO was always the patchwork, fifty commissions, five serious ones, no consistency worth building a business on. In the world where McCain’s commission has run the sport for twenty years, the patchwork is gone. The thing Zuffa built a bubble to escape got fixed before Zuffa Boxing existed. Maybe they still come, because the league model has its own appeal. But they come to a regulated sport with one set of rules, and the bill they need is two pages, not forty.

None of this happened. The House never voted on McCain. The UFC’s lobbyists buried Mullin twice, and he left for the Cabinet thirty days before the Senate’s boxing hearing. Instead we got our timeline: the patchwork, the shopping, the taxi to the hospital, the glove box, and now a Senate bill that rebuilds some of the medical floor while leaving the rest of the architecture—the registry, the enforcer, the fighter definition—sitting in the congressional record where it died.

Which brings us to the man holding the pen now. Ted Cruz is in the position McCain occupied twenty years ago, chairman of the same committee, name on the bill, and the difference between the timelines above is one House vote that never came. McCain is remembered for the version of this sport he almost delivered. Cruz gets to choose which timeline his name goes on: the one where the bill fixed part of the medical table and left the architecture in the files, or the one where the amendment process this fall finally finished the sentence Congress started writing in 2000.

Because the seventeen fixes this site published are not utopian. They are mostly the parts of this fantasy that already passed a chamber of Congress, dusted off and pointed at the bill currently moving. The registry is McCain’s. The fighter definition is Mullin’s. The enforcement is the commission this committee approved twice without a single no vote. No unicorns required. Congress does not need to imagine this sport. It already wrote it. It just never finished passing it, and reconciliation season is a fine time to finally vote for the world it almost built.