By Larry Goldberg
Jake Hager took a serious eye injury at a Power Slap event this week, and Dana White was asked about it at the Contender Series press conference. “He went into emergency surgery that night and then we’re sending him to a specialist down in Miami,” White said.
Then a reporter asked whether anything could be done to avoid that kind of injury. “So, there’s lots of unfortunate things that happen in combat sports,” White said. “Those two kids that couldn’t stay here tonight and they’re in the hospital. I mean, it’s a contact sport. It happens. What you do is you make sure that you do all the proper medical testing before the fight. You have the right guys there during the fight, and you take care of these kids after the fight.”
Before. During. After. I’m not a fan of slap fighting and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But in a state like New Jersey, which has not approved Power Slap, combat sports are combat sports. If Power Slap were licensed in New Jersey, the commission’s medical requirements would be the same ones the boxers on my cards already meet, because the sport doesn’t change what a head strike does. That isn’t true everywhere. In plenty of states the standard depends on what the commission has written for that particular sport, or on a local ordinance, or on nothing at all. That is exactly why White’s answer matters beyond his own product. It’s the right way to think about what a fighter is owed, whatever the rule set.
It’s also worth being honest about what that standard costs, and who in this industry can actually afford it.
I am not TKO. I have promoted twenty-one club level cards, and I believe I do it better than most of the people at my level. Here is what “before, during, and after” looks like at a club show run with the best of intentions. Before the fight, there are pre-fight medicals. We pay for them, or the fighter’s manager pays for them. Blood work, EKG, eye exam, physical, imaging where the state requires it. During the fight, there are commission-appointed doctors at ringside watching every round, doctors I did not pick and cannot influence. After the fight, if something goes wrong, the fighter goes to the hospital, and there is an event medical insurance policy the promoter carries to cover it.
That insurance is usually written to what the state requires, and within it we get the fighter the best care available. That’s not indifference. That’s the system nearly every promoter in this country operates under, and it works most of the time. But it is a fundamentally different thing from a billion-dollar company that can send a fighter to a specialist anywhere in the world and keep him under its own medical team’s watch for as long as it takes. I don’t have that. Nobody at my level does. When the policy limit is reached, the policy is done.
Look at what TKO does on the other side of the house. WWE’s wellness policy doesn’t stop at contracted performers. Any wrestling fan knows that program has saved countless lives after people left the company, through screening and treatment WWE had no obligation to provide. That is what a company with real resources and a real medical operation can do, and I’ve said many times that TKO runs one of the best medical operations in all of sports. What White described this week isn’t a demand on the rest of the industry. It’s what they do, because they can.
That model doesn’t work on a club show where I need to sell nine tickets at $100 apiece just to cover the insurance and pre-fight medicals. The rest of combat sports lives somewhere between what TKO does and the state minimum. Some promoters go well past what the policy requires. Some don’t, and I know fighters who found that out the hard way after an injury on a bigger card than mine. But the honest picture is that most of this industry is doing what the insurance allows and hoping it’s enough.
That’s why I supported the medical floor in the Senate bill, at least for boxers, which is the only place Congress is currently writing one. I’ve argued with that bill for a year on contracts and titles and I’m not done arguing. But the medical section is the first federal floor for professional boxers in thirty years, and the states can finish the job from there. New Jersey already lives above it. Most states don’t.
Before, during, and after is the right standard. The biggest company in combat sports is meeting it with its own money. For everyone else, the question is how close the floor can be raised toward it, because intentions have never been the problem. Resources are.
