By Larry Goldberg and Boxing Insider Staff
Here is a number 99.9 percent of boxing fans do not know: only five states in America require a brain scan for every professional boxer. California, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island. That’s it. The rest never ask the question, or ask it only after a fighter turns 35 or 40.
Which means the safe sport most people think they’re watching does not exist in most of the country. Believe it or not, it’s the sanctioning bodies that mandate the drug testing and medicals at the title level; below that, on the undercards, it’s whatever the state says. A fighter who fails a medical in a strict state drives a few hours and gets licensed in a weak one. Commission shopping is a thing; Mike Tyson was famous for it at the end of his career. Same sport, same punches, same brains, different rules depending on the state.
I promote club boxing shows in the two strictest states there are, New Jersey and New York, and most fans have no idea what that means. Full medicals, and full means full: brain scans for every fighter, EKGs, dilated eye exams, blood panels, real insurance minimums, and matchmaking with teeth, a commission actually reviewing whether a fight should happen before it happens. I am not complaining; I have asked these commissions for additional rules myself. The fighters are safer because these states require the work.
The whole problem with American boxing is that the rules change at every state line. Only five states require brain scans. Only five.
My position has not changed through this entire Ali Act debate. Whatever the rules are for me should be the rules for them. All of them. And the Senate bill is a real step from where we are now, a first federal floor in states that have never had one. It just is not California or New York. It requires an eye exam without specifying what kind, and on the brain it asks the question those states answer with a scan, then accepts a different answer.
Start with what fans may not realize. The Ali Act and the federal safety law beneath it cover boxing only. MMA has no federal layer at all: no contract limits, no disclosures, no medical floor. An MMA fighter’s protections are whatever his contract says and whatever his state requires. And under this bill as written, the gap gets codified: even a weak state’s boxing rules would now carry the new federal medical table, while its MMA rules sit below them, untouched. Toss bare knuckle onto the pile too, since the same state commissions now regulate it. Two fighters can compete in the same building on the same night, absorb the same head trauma, and only one has federal law standing behind him.
A company like the UFC exceeds all of it, running the same medicals in all 50 states no matter what the local commission asks, though even they file every jurisdiction’s specific paperwork; the forms New Jersey wants are not the forms Nevada wants, and some states add tests on top, New Jersey’s extra bloodwork comes to mind. That is what a few billion dollars buys, and it is not who this column is about. We are talking about everyone else, where the state’s floor is the only floor there is. Nobody asks a regional promoter to build a performance institute, any more than anyone demands Major League Baseball’s facilities from a Single-A club. But Single-A has standards: medical staffing, facility minimums, a floor set and substantially paid for by the top of the sport, because the majors know the minors are where their future comes from. Combat sports is the only game with a billion dollar ceiling, no pyramid underneath, and a floor that changes at every state line and disappears entirely in the cage. The answer is not UFC standards for everyone. It is a floor everywhere, scaled sanely, with the people who profit most helping carry it.
Here is the scenario that should end the debate, and it starts with how the paperwork actually works. A boxer gets an MRI in a strict state and fails it. The imaging center tells him and the doctor who ordered it. Nobody else knows, because nothing gets filed until the fighter himself submits it. Today he simply never turns it in and goes boxing in one of the 40-plus states that never required a scan.
And here is where I have to be straight about what the Senate bill does and does not fix. It requires every state to confront the brain health question, and that is real progress. But because of the single word “or” I wrote about in my last column, a neurologic exam can still stand in for the scan. An exam cannot see inside the skull. So the fighter sitting on a failed scan can still do what fighters have always done: find a jurisdiction that never checks, and fight. If they require the actual scan in all 50 states, that door closes. The only option left is fighting overseas, and at that point the American system has done its job.
And boxing is only his first option. The second is the cage. The third is the rise of bare knuckle boxing, which cosmetically is more brutal than boxing, and whose safety comparison is a column for another day, but here is what matters now: those boxers are not covered. Same fighter, same failed scan, four-ounce gloves or bare hands, in whatever state asks the least, because every mandate in this bill stops at the word boxing. Three options, and this bill closes none of them. What are we doing?
Part of this job is protecting fighters from themselves. Every week I see washed MMA fighters who like to strike, or bare-knuckle guys looking for a payday, offered as B-sides at the club level. They come from situations and states that never required a scan, so there is no imaging history. To fight in New York or New Jersey you need one, and because these guys have never been looked at, it is always a crapshoot what comes back from the imaging center. From a promoter’s standpoint you have paid for the scan, held the slot on the card, and you find out with everyone else whether he passed, or you are starting from scratch: a new opponent, new medicals, and another round of bills. We need one set of rules on the medicals, and we need a version of McCain’s national registry to track them, run by the ABC and the ringside physicians this bill just deputized.
The fighter is not the only one who can switch rulebooks. This bill raises the cost of every boxing card in America, and I have said throughout this series that the safety is worth paying for. But nothing stops me, or any promoter, from quitting boxing, driving to a weak state, and promoting bare knuckle instead. No federal medical table, no insurance floor, no matchmaking review worth the name, at a fraction of what my licensed cards cost. I won’t do it. But a bill that raises every cost in the regulated sport while asking nothing of the one next door is pricing promoters toward the door.
Until last week this was theoretical. Then MVP and PFL merged into one company running elite boxing and MMA rosters out of the same office, and the two-rulebook problem got a street address. Under this bill, Jake Paul’s boxers get federal contract caps, three years on a first deal and six after that, plus negotiation windows and disclosure rules. His MMA fighters can be signed for as long as the paper says, with the career-length exclusive deals and champion’s clauses the Ali Act banned in boxing 25 years ago. Same company, same executives, same lawyers, in some cases the same fighters crossing between rosters. And the strangest part: PFL already operates as a UBO in everything but name, its own titles, its own rankings, fighters under contract to the organization that crowns them, all perfectly legal because it is MMA. The boxing arm of that same company is prohibited by the current Ali Act from the exact structure its MMA arm runs today, which is the entire reason this bill exists. Congress is spending a year legislating permission for boxing to do what the other half of the same building already does without asking.
Sit with that for a second. One merged company, two divisions doing the same fundamental thing, putting fighters in front of cameras to trade blows to the head for money, under completely different rules. Not because anyone decided that makes sense. Because one set of fighters wears ten-ounce gloves and got a law in 2000, and the other wears four-ounce gloves and did not.
I know the politics, and the politics just changed. For a decade, extending the Ali Act to MMA was read as a weapon aimed at one company. That is how Mullin’s bill was received, that is why the UFC hired the lobbyists, and that is how it died. That excuse is now gone. The biggest new entrant in MMA is a boxing company, run by the sport’s loudest voice on fighter pay, with its founder headed into the cage himself. Extending the Act today targets nobody; it covers everybody, including the disruptor. Which leaves everyone with the same simple standard: one set of rules for combat sports. That is not my phrase, it is New Jersey’s; the statute I promote under is a combat sports law, not a boxing law with everything else bolted on. One commission, one rulebook, every sport where people get hit in the head, from the medicals down to the betting rules, which cover every fight while this bill’s cover one class of company. If a state agency can write it, Congress can copy it.
And the fix is one word, one Congress has already written. In 2016, Rep. Markwayne Mullin, a former MMA fighter himself, introduced the Muhammad Ali Expansion Act, which formally defined “fighter” in federal law and extended these exact protections to every combat sports athlete. He reintroduced it in 2017 with more than 50 co-sponsors. The UFC hired a Washington lobbying firm to oppose it, no Senate version was ever filed, and it died in committee, twice. Then came the part you could not script: Mullin went on to the Senate, talked about reintroducing his bill from that side, and this March left for the president’s Cabinet, thirty days before the Senate held its boxing hearing. The one man who wrote the exact fix missed the entire fighter-protection debate by a month. His language is still sitting in the record, drafted, co-sponsored, and tested.
Amendments are expected after the August recess, and the senators asked what would make this bill better. Covering every fighter is one answer, and it is not the only one. I have been through this bill page by page, and later this week in this space I am publishing the whole list: sixteen fixes, in plain English, that close every hole this series has found, and that let Zuffa, the sanctioning bodies, the commissions, the fighters, and promoters like me all walk away with a win. The senators asked. We’re answering.
