By Larry Goldberg
The Senate Commerce Committee sent the Muhammad Ali American Boxing Revival Act to the Senate floor this morning without touching the word that lets a fighter under 40 skip a brain scan. S. 5188 was reported without amendments. The brain health table still reads MRI or a neurologic examination. The exam stays. The scan does not have to.
That is not a drafting quirk. It is the cheapest way to satisfy a federal medical table, and cheapest is what gets used. A neurologist in an office can check reflexes, balance, and coordination. He cannot see a bleed, a lesion, or a vascular malformation. The bill treats the two as equals for every fighter who has not turned 40, which is most of the sport, and it will be used that way on exactly the cards where nobody is watching. Striking one word fixes it.
The registry, the chain of custody, and the fighters this floor does not cover went out of committee with it. Those are later fights. This one is a word.
This morning Chairman Cruz posted a letter from Nico Ali Walsh, who testified against this bill in April, and treated it as the fighter’s blessing. Walsh listed five changes he fought for: shorter promotional contracts, a path to free agency, transparent rankings, a firewall between promoters, UBOs, and managers, and financial disclosure. All five are contract terms. None is medical.
That is the whole story of this bill’s trip through the Senate. The business fight got a fighter, a chairman, ten months of meetings, and a public thank-you. The scan got nothing, because there is no money in a brain scan and nobody with a lobbyist was asking.
This is the same committee that produced John McCain’s boxing bill twenty years ago, and that bill was better. It had the national medical registry this one does not. It went after the sanctioning bodies, which this one leaves alone. It came out of hearings where the chairman dragged promoters and alphabet officials in front of him and made them answer, and it was written by a man who had been in the fight business as a boxer and understood what the paperwork was hiding. McCain’s version never became law and the sport has spent twenty-five years paying for it. But he ran a better committee, and he wrote a better bill, and the distance between his and this one is the distance between regulating a sport and accommodating it.
The bill is not law. The Senate floor and the reconciliation with the House are both still ahead, and a new matching House version is expected. Any of those is a place to strike one word. Imaging is the baseline. The neurological exam is additional. No delay, no politics, no fight with anyone. Ten minutes of drafting.
We sent every office on the committee ten specific fixes five days before this vote, with the language written out. This is the one that costs nothing and saves the most.
The medical table in this bill is the biggest step forward for federal fighter safety since 1996. That is precisely why the hole in it matters. A weak bill with a gap is ordinary. The first real floor in thirty years, with a door cut into it, is something else. Pass it without the door. A brain scan is not a bargaining chip.
Larry Goldberg is the publisher of BoxingInsider.com and a licensed boxing promoter in New Jersey and New York.
