The Cruz version of the Ali Act writes a betting rule for unified boxing organizations and nobody else in combat sports. A New Jersey memo from 2024 reaches every discipline the state licenses, boxing and MMA alike.
Section 21A(g) of the Senate’s Muhammad Ali American Boxing Revival Act is called a boxing conduct policy. It requires a unified boxing organization to bar a fighter and a defined circle around him from betting on his own fight, or from passing nonpublic information to somebody who will.
Now read the definition it hangs on. A unified boxing organization is an association, league, or centralized industry organization that stages matches between boxers under contract with it, under unified rules, with its own system of title belts. That is not a description of the boxing industry. That is a description of a single corporate structure, and everyone who has followed this legislation knows which one is being built to fit it. Nothing stops a second or third from forming. Nothing suggests one will. The betting rule the Senate is presenting as an integrity measure would, on the day it takes effect, govern one promotional model and nothing else in American combat sports.
Two Chambers, One Year, Same Blind Spot
This provision is not a Senate invention. The House passed a nearly identical conduct policy in March at Section 24(g) of its engrossed text, down to the covered individual definition. The Senate made one substantive change, adding a requirement that the organization enforce any suspension or other penalty imposed by a state, territorial, or tribal boxing commission. That is a real improvement and it is the only one.
Which is the point. Two committees, in two chambers, across a full year of drafting, both looked at wagering on prizefights and both wrote a rule that reaches a category of organization that does not yet exist. Neither asked the obvious question about the rest of the sport.
What the Provision Actually Reaches
The prohibition attaches to a covered match, defined as a professional boxing match organized by a unified boxing organization. No such organization has claimed the status. Every other promoter in the country, from the majors down to the club level, sits outside it. So does every mixed martial arts promotion, every bare knuckle promotion, and every kickboxing card in America.
The definition of a covered individual is the best thing in the section. It includes an adult living in the same household as the boxer, a coach, a manager, an athletic trainer, a physician or other medical professional who provides services to the boxer, and an employee, officer, or director of the organization. That household clause is a genuine addition. Anyone who has been around this business knows that the person placing the bet is frequently not the person who can throw a punch.
Then look at what happens when somebody violates it. The only penalty anywhere in the bill is a single amendment to the criminal section: an officer or employee of a unified boxing organization who knowingly violates Section 21A faces up to one year and a $20,000 fine. That is a federal misdemeanor, prosecutable only by the Department of Justice, under a statute whose criminal provisions have gone essentially unused since 1996. A fighter who bets on himself faces nothing under federal law. The organization is left to police him, and the organization is the entity whose event the betting concerns.
New Jersey Did This Already, and Did It Better
On November 12, 2024, the New Jersey State Athletic Control Board issued a five-page memorandum to all licensees, officials, and employees setting out the Board’s sports betting policy. The Attorney General’s office announced it two weeks later, effective immediately. It is not legislation. It is a policy memo, and it is broader than what either chamber of Congress has produced since.
Section 4 of that memo prohibits promoters, participants, their agents, managers, and seconds from placing, soliciting, or facilitating a bet on any combative sports event, and from receiving any benefit, directly or indirectly, from any bet on a combative sports event held in New Jersey. Not the fight they are working. Any combative sports event. The prohibition runs for the entire term of licensure.
Section 5 imposes an affirmative duty to report. Anyone who becomes aware of a violation must report it to the Commissioner immediately, and anyone approached about influencing a bout must report the approach. Neither the House nor the Senate bill contains a reporting duty of any kind.
Section 6 gives it teeth that exist in the real world: license suspension, revocation, fines, imposed by the Board itself, plus a separate disorderly persons offense under the Sports Wagering Act. It also lets the Board discipline a promoter or participant who violates the promoter’s own integrity policy, which turns a voluntary house rule into an enforceable one.
The Word That Matters Is “Combative”
New Jersey did not write a boxing policy. It wrote a combative sports policy, because that is the language of the statute the Board operates under, and that statute reaches boxing, kick boxing, wrestling, and mixed martial arts alike. One memo covered every discipline the commission licenses. It did not require an act of Congress, a working group, or a two-year implementation runway.
That is the model, and the reason it is the model is that the betting market never respected the distinction in the first place. A sportsbook takes action on a four-round preliminary boxing match, an MMA prelim, and a bare knuckle bout from the same app, on the same screen, minutes apart. The same state commission licensed all three. The same doctor may have cleared fighters on all three cards. Writing an integrity rule that stops at the ropes of one kind of boxing ring, while the promotion down the hall takes the same wagers under the same commission, is not a regulatory scheme. It is a gap nobody bothered to close.
The exposure is worst exactly where the coverage is thinnest. Nobody needs inside information to bet a pay-per-view main event. The vulnerable market is the small show, where the line is thin, where a modest wager moves the number, and where the information that matters is mundane. A fighter hurt in camp. A late replacement who took the bout on four days’ notice. A weight miss that has not been announced. A hand that did not heal. That information sits with a handful of people, and at that level it can be worth more than the purse.
What Should Happen Next
Two things, and neither requires Congress to do anything difficult.
First, Section 21A(g) should be extended the same way Section 21A(f)(3) was extended. The Senate already used that drafting move in this bill, applying the contract protections to any contract between a boxer and a promoter rather than only to unified boxing organizations. The medical table got the same treatment and now reaches every club show in America. The committee understood perfectly well how to make a provision apply to the whole sport. It made that choice for contracts. It made it for medicals. It did not make it for betting, and the beneficiary of that omission is every promoter the rule does not touch.
Second, the Association of Boxing Commissions should adopt a model betting and integrity policy on the New Jersey template and recommend it to every member commission, covering every combat sport that commission licenses, with the household provision from the bill folded in. Tribal regulatory bodies should be part of that conversation from the beginning, not brought in afterward, because a meaningful share of American fight cards now takes place under tribal jurisdiction and outside state athletic commission authority entirely.
The Senate Commerce Committee takes up amendments after the August recess. The bill text is public now. Extending the conduct policy costs nothing, burdens no promoter already following state rules, and does in one clause what one state commission did on its own authority in five pages.
Legal wagering on combat sports is not going away. The rule governing who may place those wagers should not depend on which company promotes the fight or which glove the fighter is wearing.
