By Larry Goldberg and Boxing Insider Staff

There is no age limit anywhere in the Senate’s Muhammad Ali American Boxing Revival Act. No provision bans the over-40 fighter, no clause forces the veteran journeyman into retirement, and no senator has said a word about ending the careers of the oldest men in the sport. The bill just does the arithmetic instead.

Here is the medical table for a fighter 40 or older under the new national floor. An annual brain MRI and an annual MRA, two separate imaging studies, every year. An annual cardiac stress test on top of the standard EKG. The annual physical with blood work, the annual dilated eye exam, and antibody panels every six months, same as everyone else.

Medically, none of this is wrong. The Association of Ringside Physicians’ own guidance adds vascular imaging at 40, and the aging brain and heart carry risks the young ones do not. The precaution is sound. The economics are not addressed, anywhere in the text.

What the Table Costs at 40

BoxingInsider has reviewed its own medical invoices from cards licensed over the past year, along with a combative sports medicine price list used for New York area events, and the numbers settle what this table means in practice, along with something the bill never considered: the price depends entirely on where the fighter lives.

A brain MRI on our invoices: $425 in the Fort Worth market, $450 in Florida, $1,187.50 on the New York area list. A CT of the head: $200 and $325 in New Jersey, $700 in New York, and $815 at a community hospital in rural Oregon, where the nearest imaging is the only imaging and the price shows it. Identical tests, identical federal requirement, up to four times the cost by zip code, with rural fighters sometimes paying the most. Complete pre-fight medical packages on our invoices ran from $645 to $1,175 for the same compliance.

Now add the MRA the bill requires at 40, another $1,187.50 at New York rates, and the imaging alone runs $2,375 a year in the most expensive markets, on top of the physical, the eye exam, the blood panel twice a year, and the EKG. At those prices, the over-40 table clears $3,500 a year before the stress test is priced in.

Now put that against what the same bill says the fighter earns, which unlike the medical costs is identical everywhere: $200 per scheduled round, $800 for a four round fight, whether the fighter licenses in Fort Worth or Newark or the Bronx. The over-40 fighter on the club circuit, the veteran B-side who takes two or three fights a year for a few paydays, can earn less in the ring annually than the bill requires him to spend to be allowed in it, and the fighter in the wrong imaging market pays triple for the privilege.

For UBO fighters the organization pays, and the bill even adds supplemental exams for its 40-and-over roster with the UBO footing the bill. For the club fighter, the one who will never see a UBO contract, the text assigns the cost to no one, which in most states means it lands on him.

A Retirement Rule Nobody Voted On

This is how the arithmetic becomes policy. The over-40 club fighter is a specific, identifiable population: the journeyman who fills B-sides, the local veteran with a following who sells a hundred tickets, the former contender winding down. These are not fighters with promotional companies absorbing their medicals. They are fighters doing a cost-benefit calculation before every licensing cycle, and the bill just moved one side of that calculation past what the other side can cover.

No hearing examined this. No fact sheet mentions it. The provisions that got the attention were contracts and titles. The provision that ends careers is a row in a medical table, and it ends them not by prohibition but by pricing.

The counterargument deserves stating plainly: maybe that is fine. Maybe a sport built on head trauma should make it expensive to keep absorbing punches past 40, and if the cost of annual vascular imaging is what finally retires fighters who should have stopped anyway, some will call that the system working. It is a defensible position. It is also a position nobody in Congress has actually taken out loud, and there is a difference between a legislature deciding the over-40 club fighter should not exist and a legislature producing that outcome by silence on who pays a $2,375 imaging bill.

The Fixes on the Table

The options are not complicated, and none requires touching the medical standard itself. Congress can assign the cost, extending the promoter-pays or organization-pays principle it already applies to insurance premiums and UBO medicals. It can address cadence, since the bill already distinguishes age tiers and could distinguish imaging intervals the same way, on medical advice rather than by accident of drafting. Or it can leave the table exactly as written and say what the table does, so the fighters affected hear it from the people who wrote it rather than from an invoice.

Amendments are expected after the August recess. As this series has documented, the committee has been handed a long list of drafting gaps to close. This one has a face: he is 41, he is 24-19, he sells tickets in his hometown, he has passed every physical he has ever taken, and next summer, if this bill becomes law as written, the price of his license will quietly exceed the price of his purse.