By Boxing Insider Staff

The Senate version of the Muhammad Ali American Boxing Revival Act contains a provision that no advance report mentioned and that reaches far beyond the unified boxing organizations the bill was written to create. BoxingInsider.com has reviewed the full text of the bill, introduced Thursday by Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Jacky Rosen (D-NV) and posted by the Senate Commerce Committee. What follows is what is actually in it: the contract rules, the UBO system, the anti-doping structure, and the enforcement mechanism, or what exists of one.

The Provision That Reaches Every Promoter in Boxing

Section 21A(f)(3) is three sentences long and it federalizes contract length for the entire sport. After setting out the contract rules for UBOs, the bill states: “Notwithstanding another provision of law, the protections afforded to boxers under paragraphs (1)(A), (1)(C), and (2) shall apply to any contract between a boxer and a promoter to the same extent as those protections apply to a contract between a boxer and a unified boxing organization.”

Those three paragraphs are the 90 day negotiation window, the six year maximum contract length, and the three year cap on a fighter’s first professional promotional agreement. Applied to “any contract between a boxer and a promoter,” they would bind Top Rank, Matchroom, Golden Boy, PBC, and every club promoter in America, whether or not a single UBO ever forms. A prospect signing his first promotional deal anywhere in the United States could not be signed for more than three years. No promotional contract could run past six. And no contract could prohibit a fighter from talking to other promoters during the final 90 days of the deal, though the fighter could not sign elsewhere until the existing term ends.

This is the first federal regulation of ordinary promotional contract length since the original Ali Act barred coercive contracts in 2000, and it arrives in a bill that was publicly framed as creating an optional alternative system. The House version contains no equivalent provision; its contract rules apply only to UBOs. The Senate text applies to matches taking place 180 days after enactment, and the bill does not say how it treats promotional contracts already in force on that date, a question every promoter in the sport will want answered before markup.

What a UBO Is Under the Senate Bill

The bill defines a unified boxing organization as “an association, a league, or a centralized industry organization in the private sector” that stages matches between fighters under contract with it, under unified rules, and that “implements a system for title belts” for its fighters. The definition adds something the House bill does not have: a UBO “may rely upon, utilize, or recognize titles and rankings” from outside organizations. That language permits a UBO to recognize WBC, WBA, IBF, or WBO titles, or another UBO’s titles, opening the door to cross-organization fights and undisputed championships that the House structure walled off.

The core of the system is what the bill calls the alternative system for compliance. Under Section 21A(a), a UBO “shall be considered to be in compliance with the requirements of this Act” if it meets the industry safety standards in Section 5 and the conditions of the new section. That single sentence is the exemption. A qualifying UBO steps outside the original Ali Act’s coercive contract provisions, its disclosure regime, and its firewall between promoters and sanctioning bodies, and into the new section’s substitute conditions.

Those conditions are real and specific. A fighter who suffers a knockout must complete brain health examinations before fighting again. Fighters 40 and older need annual supplemental physicals including a metabolic panel and urinalysis, with a chest X-ray at least every six years. UBOs must provide a second ambulance and a second ringside physician beyond the industry baseline, and within two years every ringside physician must be certified through a program run by the Association of Boxing Commissions in partnership with the Association of Ringside Physicians. Fighters under UBO contract get training injury insurance on top of bout coverage, access to training and rehabilitation facilities at reasonable cost near where they live, and an assigned medical coordinator. The UBO pays for all of it, with one exception the bill spells out: “The cost of any deductible for any health insurance required to be provided by the unified boxing organization for a boxer shall be the financial responsibility of the boxer.”

The Senate bill also imports a version of the Ali Act firewall that the House text weakened. Section 21A(h) prohibits UBO officers, employees, and representatives from holding “any direct or indirect financial interest in the management of a boxer,” from employing or paying managers, and from receiving or requesting any payment from a boxer tied to rankings or participation, “including charging a boxer for participation in a covered match in which the boxer will be challenging a champion or defending a championship” and “any portion of an award won by the boxer.” A UBO that ranks its own fighters must also file its ratings criteria, bylaws, appeals procedure if one exists, and the names of its ratings officials with the Federal Trade Commission and the ABC every January. That answers part of the rankings transparency demand Nico Ali Walsh raised, with a catch covered below.

What the Senate Changed From the House Bill

Beyond the all-promoter contract provision, the differences from the House-passed text run in both directions. The three year first-contract cap is new; the House bill allowed six year deals from a fighter’s first signature. The negotiation window tripled from 30 days to 90. The gambling conduct policy is new: UBOs must bar fighters and a defined circle around them, including coaches, managers, trainers, treating physicians, UBO staff, and adults living in the fighter’s household, from betting on covered matches or passing inside information to bettors, and must enforce any betting suspension imposed by a commission. Doping penalties moved out of the UBO’s hands; sanctions for positive tests are imposed by the state commission or the ABC, which the bill directs to weigh the seriousness of the result and the fighter’s degree of fault.

The most consequential deletion is the title simplification section. The House bill limited sanctioning organizations and UBOs to one champion per weight class and restricted interim titles, a direct strike at the four-belt structure. The Senate bill removes that mandate entirely. The WBC, WBA, IBF, and WBO keep their existing title architecture untouched, and the sport’s proliferation of champions, which Cruz himself cited as a reason for reform at the April hearing, goes unaddressed in the chamber whose version was supposed to fix it.

The bill also raises the industry floor for everyone, UBO or not. Every promoter must pay at least $200 per scheduled round. Every fighter must carry $50,000 in medical coverage and $15,000 in accidental death coverage, with premiums that cannot be passed to the fighter. A detailed examination table becomes the national minimum: annual physicals with blood work, dilated eye exams, and electrocardiograms, stress tests and brain MRI plus MRA for fighters 40 and over, MRI or a neurologist’s examination for fighters under 40, and antibody testing every six months. Judges and referees must be certified by the state commission or the ABC in every professional match in the country.

Enforcement Is One Paragraph

The enforcement mechanism for the entire UBO system is a single amendment to the existing penalty section: “Any officer or employee of a unified boxing organization who knowingly violates, or coerces or causes any other person to violate, section 21A shall, upon conviction, be imprisoned for not more than 1 year or fined not more than $20,000, or both.”

That is the complete enforcement text. A misdemeanor, prosecutable only by the federal government, under a statute whose existing criminal provisions have gone essentially unused since 1996. The bill creates no civil enforcement mechanism for the new section, no agency with authority to audit a UBO’s compliance, and no process by which anyone verifies that an organization claiming UBO status actually meets the conditions. The FTC filing that establishes a UBO consists of three items: state of incorporation, business address, and website. The bill then provides that “in lieu of submitting the information” to the FTC at all, a UBO may satisfy the requirement by maintaining a public website that is searchable, free, and updated. The same internet alternative applies to the annual ratings disclosures. An organization can claim the exemption from the Ali Act by self-designating and posting a webpage.

One word did change from the House version, and it cuts the other way. The House text required a “willfully and knowingly” violation for criminal liability. The Senate dropped “willfully,” leaving “knowingly,” a lower bar for a prosecutor. Whether any prosecutor ever approaches that bar is the question 30 years of history answers. When the House passed the bill in March, Reps. Bobby Scott and Ilhan Omar, both of whom voted yes, called on the Senate to strengthen protections against coercive contracts and forced arbitration. The Senate text strengthens the contract terms and leaves the enforcement architecture exactly where the House left it.

The structure of the exemption compounds the gap. Because a qualifying UBO is deemed compliant with the whole Act, the provisions fighters have actually used in court, the disclosure requirements and the promoter-manager firewall of the original Ali Act, no longer apply to it in their original form. The substitute protections in Section 21A are enforceable through the $20,000 misdemeanor and nothing else the bill names.

The Anti-Doping Fine Print

The bill requires every UBO to run “a comprehensive anti-doping program,” and the details define how comprehensive. In-competition testing must cover “not fewer than half the boxers participating in each covered match,” conducted between the weigh-in and the fight by an independent third party that reports results to the UBO, the commission, and the ABC. Half is the floor; a UBO could test one fighter in a two-man fight and comply. No-notice testing during the contract period is permitted but not required; the operative word in the text is “may.”

Then there is the venue provision. A UBO must prohibit the substances on the applicable prohibited list, “except that the unified boxing organization may elect not to test a boxer participating in a covered match for any substance that is not prohibited by the boxing commission of the State in which the covered match is being held.” The testing panel travels with the venue. A UBO that stages its events in states with thin prohibited lists shrinks its own testing obligations, lawfully, by choosing the address. The bill does require each UBO to publish annually every substance it tested for and every penalty imposed the prior year, which at least makes the choice visible.

The fight-or-pay clause has its own carve-outs. A UBO must arrange one fight every six months or pay the fighter at least ten times his contractual one-round minimum, which at the $200 floor comes to $2,000 per six month period. The obligation disappears if the fighter is injured and collecting the training insurance, tests positive, or “refuses or is otherwise unable to fight for reasons beyond the control of the unified boxing organization,” including travel inability or lapsed licensure. The UBO controls the matchmaking that determines what a fighter is refusing, and the bill does not say who decides whether a refusal was reasonable.

Where It Goes From Here

The bill sits with the Senate Commerce Committee, which Cruz chairs, with amendments expected after the August recess, per ESPN. The Senate and House versions must be reconciled before the 119th Congress ends January 3, and the realistic path for a bill on that calendar runs through a year-end package, the route this publication laid out Wednesday before the text existed publicly. It exists now. The contract caps that were circulating privately among sanctioning body stakeholders are in it, extended to the whole sport. The title reform is out of it. And the enforcement mechanism for everything in it remains a one year misdemeanor and a $20,000 fine that no one has ever been charged under in the history of federal boxing law.