Muhammad Ali Told Congress What Boxing Needed in 2004. It Still Does Not Have It.

By Larry Goldberg

He testified for a boxing bill that had a national medical registry in it. Twenty-two years later the registry has never been built, and it is still the missing piece.

On September 9, 2004, Muhammad Ali appeared before a House subcommittee examining whether professional boxing needed more reform. He sat with his wife Lonnie, who read his statement into the record, and his attorney Ron DiNicola.

Here is what he said about the federal ID card that came out of the 1996 Professional Boxing Safety Act.

“This has been one of the most successful reforms to date because it has precluded fighters from getting knocked out one night and traveling across state lines to fight the next.”

Read that again, because it is the argument for a national medical registry, made by Muhammad Ali, twenty-two years ago. The problem he named is a fighter crossing a state line to escape his own medical record. The reform he praised is the one that made that harder.

And then he asked Congress to finish the job.

“There are still disturbing indications that federal, state, and tribal enforcement of boxing laws has been spotty and in some respects, non-existent.”

He endorsed Senator John McCain’s Professional Boxing Amendments Act by name, S. 275, calling it “a bold step, the right step, at an important time in the history of the sport.” That bill contained a centralized medical registry, to be used by state commissions when making licensing decisions. It also created a United States Boxing Commission with authority to enforce federal boxing law, which Ali said plainly was necessary: “Reform measures are unlikely to succeed unless a U.S. Boxing Commission is created.”

His closing line was this. “There is nothing wrong with boxing that we cannot fix.”

McCain’s bill passed the Senate more than once, by unanimous consent. The House never did. The registry was never built.

The case sitting in the same hearing

Ali was the first witness that morning. A few hours later, Bruce Spizler, testifying as chairman of the legal committee of the Association of Boxing Commissions and a Maryland regulator, told the same subcommittee about Riddick Bowe.

Bowe had retired in 1996 after two brutal fights with Andrew Golota, with what Spizler described as perceived neurological problems. In 1998, facing a federal kidnapping charge, the court credited evidence of brain injury from boxing when it sentenced him.

When word got out that Bowe was planning a comeback, the executive director of the Nevada commission told a reporter he did not foresee Bowe receiving a license in Nevada, citing those same concerns.

So Bowe did not apply in Nevada. He also did not apply in Maryland, where he lived. He applied to a newly formed tribal commission in Oklahoma, was granted a license, and was scheduled to fight on the parking lot next to a casino sixteen days after that hearing.

Spizler’s explanation of how that was possible is one sentence: “In the absence of uniform medical standards or a centralized medical registry.”

Greg Sirb, then running the Pennsylvania commission, put it more directly to the same panel. “A concussion doesn’t leave you just because you leave your State.” And this, which could have been written yesterday: “It is not uncommon for a boxer who knows he cannot pass the medicals of one state to search out another state that has less stringent requirements so that they may continue their boxing careers.”

What exists now, and what does not

The federal ID card Ali praised still exists, and so does the national suspension list attached to it. When a fighter is knocked out, or cut, or a ringside physician refuses to certify him on fight night, that goes into the system. Under the Association of Boxing Commissions’ own guidelines, a fighter whose event physician will not clear him is immediately placed on the national suspension list.

Ali was right about what that fixed. A man cannot get knocked out on Friday and fight on Saturday two states over. That was real progress and it still is.

It did not fix the rest. The hole is narrower and worse than most people realize.

A suspension is something that happens to a licensed fighter. Take a man who applies for a license in New York. New York requires a brain MRI on a 1.5 Tesla magnet with six specified sequences, reviewed before clearance, and a finding of prior traumatic brain injury on that scan is grounds for denial. Say the scan finds something. He is denied.

He was never licensed. There was no bout, no injury report, no suspension to enter. The denial sits in a file in one state. The next month he applies somewhere that does not require imaging of anyone, gets cleared, and fights.

Nobody broke a rule. The system tracks what happens to licensed fighters, and this man was never licensed. The most important medical event in his life is the one thing that does not travel.

And it can be worse than that. I have had New York suspend a fighter off one of my own cards for a medical reason, and then watched another state license him anyway. The suspension existed. It was issued by the strictest commission in the country. It did not stop anything, because the next state either did not look or looked and did not care.

So this is a missing file plus no duty to read the file that already exists.

The part of Ali’s ask that is still available

He wanted a United States Boxing Commission. This column is not asking for one.

Congress has declined to create that agency and there is no version of the current Congress that stands one up and funds it. Arguing for it now is arguing for nothing. But the commission was the delivery mechanism, not the point. The point was a file that follows the fighter and somebody obligated to read it, and that part does not require a new federal bureaucracy at all.

Where the file lives

The institutional home already exists. The ABC runs the suspension system, publishes a medical release form, and has a written procedure for one commission to request another’s exam records. They built the request protocol and never built the cabinet. Its own constitution commits it to promoting standard reporting between members, including injury reports, suspensions, and other medical information.

What it needs is somewhere the imaging can legally live, because a commission doctor is not going to call a facility three states away and wait for a disc. If the scan is not in the file, the file does not get used.

And it has to be gated to physicians. Commission doctors and ringside physicians only, with the fighter’s authorization built into the license application the way consent already works for drug testing, and an audit log behind every look. No promoter account. No manager account. The moment a matchmaker can see the file, the registry becomes a shopping list.

The medicals belong to the fighter. When a man is released from a contract, or his deal runs out, or the company that signed him moves on, his scans do not belong to the company he just left. They belong to him and to whatever doctor looks at him next. Right now that file disperses. Some with a promoter, some with a manager, some in a commission cabinet in a state he fought in once, most of it nowhere.

And somebody has to be required to look

This is the half that matters more than the file.

A registry nobody has to consult is a website. A suspension nobody has to honor is a PDF. Write the duty in one sentence: no license issued until the last commission’s file has been opened, including denials, not just suspensions.

Without that, a New York denial and an Oklahoma license can coexist forever, and both jurisdictions can say they followed their own rules, because they did.

The mechanism is the ABC’s own bylaws and model rules. No license without a query. No result closed without an upload. Not a recommendation, a condition of membership. For the commissions that stay out, publish the participation list every year and name who queries and who does not. That is the whip, not the plan.

Who pays for it

Congress will not. The bill now heading to the Senate floor writes a federal medical table and gives the results nowhere to live, and it was priced as legislation that spends almost nothing.

Which leaves the money already inside this sport. The promoters, the networks, the sanctioning bodies collecting a fee on every title fight, the operators who have spent enormously on cards in the last three years. Any one of them could endow this for less than a single main event purse. The only condition that matters is that whoever writes the check has no vote on who gets cleared. Independent board, physician majority, published audit. Fund it and step back.

Ali asked for enforcement, because he said the existing laws were being enforced spottily or not at all. He praised, specifically, the reform that stopped a fighter from crossing a state line to escape his own medical record. And he asked Congress to finish the job. The House never did.

So the job falls to the sport. This bill is going to the floor with a medical table and no cabinet for the results, and the industry can build the cabinet without another hearing, another vote, or another twenty-two years.

The man it protects is not on television. He is taking a four-round bout in a state he has never worked before, brought in on short notice, carrying whatever paperwork somebody handed him on Wednesday. Nobody in that building has seen him before and nobody will see him again.

Somebody should know what happened to him last year.

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