By Larry Goldberg

The Professional Boxing Safety Act has required every commission in America to honor a suspension issued for a series of consecutive losses. It never said what a series is, and most states never decided.

Here is a sentence that has been federal law since 1996.

Every boxing commission must establish procedures to ensure that no boxer is permitted to box while under suspension from any boxing commission due to “a recent knockout or series of consecutive losses,” an injury, a requirement for a medical procedure, or “physician denial of certification.”

Read the two ends of that. A series of consecutive losses. And a physician denying certification. Both are listed in the statute as grounds for a suspension that every other commission in the country is obligated to honor.

The same section requires commissions to evaluate each fighter’s professional record and the physician’s certification before a bout, and to deny authorization where appropriate. A state does not even need a formal suspension to stop a fight. It can look at a record and say no.

The law is not missing a tool. For thirty years it has told every commission to look at a record before a bout and to honor a consecutive-loss suspension issued anywhere in the country. What it never created is the suspension itself.

Because it never said what a series of consecutive losses is.

Three straight? Six? Ten? By knockout or by any method? Over what period? The statute leaves all of it to the commissions, and a state that never wrote a number never issues the suspension, and a suspension that never gets issued is not a suspension anyone has to honor.

The federal obligation is real and it is triggered by nothing.

The states that wrote a number

A handful did the work, and they do not agree.

New Jersey is the strictest. Six consecutive losses brings an automatic suspension, and the fighter is not reinstated until passing a commission-appointed physician’s examination of the type New Jersey requires for licensure, which includes a CT or MRI of the brain within the last three years. No physician recommendation required to impose the hold, and imaging built into getting out of it.

Pennsylvania requires a medical examination after six consecutive defeats, and the rule specifically counts losses “either within or outside the jurisdiction of the Commission,” which means Pennsylvania is looking at what happened to a fighter in other states. The suspension itself is discretionary.

Ohio does not suspend on a streak at all. It lets the commission, the executive director, or the ringside physician order an EKG or an MRI when a fighter has lost three or more in a row by knockout or technical knockout, has lost five in a row, or has what the rule calls an extensive losing record. That is a scan, not a stop.

Georgia escalates. Two straight knockouts can mean a six-month suspension, six straight by any method can trigger a hearing, and six straight by stoppage can mean a year. Hawaii says four consecutive losses may be cause for suspension pending a special study. Nebraska can place a fighter on administrative suspension after five. Virginia requires a special exception before a fighter with ten or more consecutive losses goes on a card.

Mandatory in one state, discretionary in another, a scan rather than a stop in a third. And in most of the country, nothing at all.

New York does more than the rule requires

New York wrote the most precise number of any state: three straight by knockout or technical knockout, or six straight by any method. And then it did something better than the rule, which is where New York’s real protection lives.

The commission’s medical manual treats a fighter as high risk at 40 or older, or with six straight losses in any professional combat sport, three straight by stoppage, a year or more of inactivity after turning pro, or ten or more career losses. Those fighters can be sent for an MRI with SWI or GRE sequences, an MRA, a neurologist, neurocognitive testing, and a cardiac workup. That is the most serious losing-streak screen in the country, and it happens before anyone is cleared to fight there.

The regulation itself is softer. The hold is optional, it runs through a commission physician’s recommendation, and the rule adds that a suspension under it “shall not be considered a suspension for any other purpose.” Compare that to New York’s knockout rule, where a suspension forfeits the license until neurological clearance and is recorded by a commission official. That one travels.

So New York protects fighters on New York cards better than almost anywhere, and a fighter it will not clear can still take a bout the following month in a state that never defined a streak. The screen is a gate on a New York license. It is not a suspension the rest of the country has to honor, and that is the gap in the whole system.

This was recommended and then dropped

In 2000, a National Association of Attorneys General task force recommended that every commission implement a medical classification system establishing risk levels for boxing injuries. For a fighter whose record contained any element of a high-risk classification, repeated knockouts being the example given, commissions would be required to impose a temporary suspension until the fighter obtained medical clearance, including a neurological examination by a neurologist using MRI, plus an electrocardiogram.

That is a losing-streak trigger with a scan attached, recommended by the attorneys general of the states, twenty-six years ago. The Government Accountability Office relayed it to Congress in 2003. Nobody built it.

And in 2002 the president of the Association of Boxing Commissions told the Senate Commerce Committee that reciprocal enforcement then applied only to knockouts, consecutive losses, and medical reasons, and asked Congress to extend it to every suspension a commission issues. Consecutive losses were already supposed to be one of the categories that traveled. He was still asking for uniform follow-through.

McCain’s own bills eventually wrote a number into federal text, ten straight defeats or five straight by knockout, and the Senate passed that language twice. The House never did.

Why this is the rule that matters

A knockout is loud. Everybody in the building sees it, the referee waves it off, a suspension gets entered, and the system works about as well as it works.

A losing streak is quiet.

A fighter who has lost six in a row on points has been hit a great deal and never once been stopped. Nothing triggers. No suspension, no examination, no note in any file. Another fight gets taken in eight weeks because the money is needed and somebody needs an opponent, and the only thing standing in the way is whether the state bothered to write a rule.

When Congress first took this up in 1996, the House committee looked at three boxers who between them had lost hundreds of fights and kept crossing state lines to do it. That was the problem the statute was written for. The sentence made it into the law. The number never did.

What a state can do tomorrow

This is the cheapest fix in fighter safety, because it requires no new equipment and almost no money.

Define the trigger. Pick a number, and count bouts in every jurisdiction rather than only your own. Pennsylvania already writes it that way.

Attach a consequence. A mandatory hold until the fighter obtains medical clearance, with imaging included and not just an office visit. New Jersey already does both.

And make it travel. Issue it as a medical suspension, record it, and send it to the registry. A hold a state defines as not a suspension for any other purpose is a local license condition, and federal law has nothing to pick up.

None of that takes an act of Congress. Congress wrote the sentence in 1996 and left the load-bearing word undefined, and thirty years of evidence says most states will meet a federal floor and stop there.

Somebody just has to decide what a losing streak is.

Larry Goldberg is the publisher of BoxingInsider.com and a licensed boxing promoter in New Jersey and New York.