By Larry Goldberg
Running this website and promoting club boxing shows while Congress rewrites boxing law has turned me into an unbearable expert on rules and statutes in more jurisdictions than any sane person should know. This week, the Ali Act series got its test case, and the test case has a face. Not a name in a bill, not a lobbyist, but one of boxing’s best showmen, a man with more personality and a better mouth than 99 percent of the wrestlers employed by the company lobbying for that bill. Boxing is a small world. I once had dinner with Jarrell Miller and Jose Guzman, and my late father, nervous at first about how much Jarrell was going to eat, joked that Jarrell’s arms were bigger than his own head. Jarrell is a funny, personable guy. This week he asked people to speak out for him. He’s got me.
Miller has been escalating in real time. First came the post: “I Earn my spot paid my dues I respect all the sanction Body’s it’s time to have American Heavy champion once again WBA LFG and do the right thing much love.” Then a Story, set to Nipsey Hussle’s Victory Lap: “Do right thing @wbaboxingofficial I’m not taking no step aside money paid my fees yall wanted be man of yall word.” Step aside money. No offer has been confirmed by anyone, and Miller gave no details, but fighters do not usually refuse money nobody mentioned.
Then on Friday he stopped hinting and named the man in charge. In a statement posted to Instagram, addressed to WBA President Gilberto Mendoza Jr., Miller wrote that he has attended WBA conventions, supported the organization, and paid his sanctioning fees, “and respected the process. That includes my last fight against my brother @lenorpero a fight that was clearly presented to me as a FINAL TITLE ELIMINATOR.”
Read that again, because it is the whole case in one sentence. The WBA’s clarification says the bout was not a final eliminator. The man who fought it says it was clearly presented to him as one. Both cannot be true.
Miller went on: “Now, after everything has been done, every fee has been paid, every sacrifice has been made, and I fought my way into position, I’m being told there was an ‘ERROR.’ How does that happen?” He called on Mendoza directly “to step in, investigate this situation and correct this injustice,” and added: “Fighters WANT TO FIGHT. But warriors need to know what they’re fighting FOR. We shouldn’t be risking our lives in that ring, fighting blindly with no clear path toward a world championship.” And then the line that should worry every sanctioning body reading it: “This is exactly why so many fighters and fans are losing faith in boxing’s sanctioning system and why new organizations are stepping into the sport.”
He is making the public case as well as anyone could. What he has not done is the one thing that carries legal force. So here is the rest.
The record backs him. The WBA sanctioned a fight billed everywhere as a heavyweight title eliminator. Miller (28-1-2, 22 KOs) won it clean over 12 hard rounds against an unbeaten Olympian, and the WBA’s own July rankings then listed him as the division’s official mandatory challenger. Then, this week, the WBA announced its rankings were an “inadvertent error.” Miller is not the mandatory. Moses Itauma is. The statement does not say who made the error, how it happened, or what Miller’s win earned him. It gets the date of the fight wrong.
Now consider who benefits. Itauma is 21, unbeaten, the WBA’s confirmed mandatory, ranked No. 1 by the WBO, and the most marketable young heavyweight in the world. He fights Filip Hrgovic on August 29 for the vacant IBF title. Miller, whom the corrected rankings still place at No. 2, directly behind Itauma, is a 38-year-old American with a complicated history and none of that shine. When an error gets corrected, and the correction happens to move the smaller draw out of the way of the bigger one, the organization’s burden of explanation gets heavier, not lighter. The WBA has offered four paragraphs. None of this proves bad intent. That is exactly the problem, and an organization that World Boxing News has recently counted as recognizing 43 champions across 17 weight divisions does not have the benefit of the doubt in its budget.
Follow the money to see what the clarification is worth. A mandatory challenger is expensive. He must be fought, ordered to a purse bid, or paid to step aside at a price he names. A fighter who was mistakenly listed costs nothing. If the plan is to put every belt on Itauma and unify the division on schedule, the cheapest version of that plan starts with Miller’s mandatory status not existing. Four paragraphs on a website just saved somebody a fortune, and Miller’s own words tell you he knows it. You cannot sell a step-aside from a position they say you never held. Position first. Then talk.
Boxing has been down this road before. In 1998, Graciano Rocchigiani beat Michael Nunn for a vacant light heavyweight title, and the sanctioning body involved later told him its rankings listing him as champion had been typographical errors after the bigger star, Roy Jones Jr., wanted back in. Rocchigiani sued in federal court in New York. His lawyer called it “an outright theft,” and a Manhattan jury agreed, awarding more than $30 million before the sides settled. That was a different organization, a different leadership, and a different century, and it later closed the book honestly. The lesson has not aged: “our rankings were a typo” is not a legal defense, and the WBA should not want to be the organization that tests it again.
Miller has a tool Rocchigiani did not, and here is where my unbearable expertise earns its keep. The Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act, John McCain’s law, says at 15 U.S.C. § 6307c that if a boxer questions his rating, the sanctioning body must give him a written explanation within seven days, including answers to his specific questions, with a copy filed to the Association of Boxing Commissions. The law’s criminal penalties have sat essentially untouched for 26 years and only the Justice Department can invoke them. But the statute’s own condition is the lever Miller’s posts keep pointing at, knowingly or not: a sanctioning body that ignores its ratings obligations is not entitled to collect its fees. The fees Miller keeps saying he paid. An Instagram statement, however righteous, starts no clock. A formal demand does, and it creates a paper trail, and a paper trail is what won Rocchigiani his verdict.
I am not Jarrell’s lawyer, and he never asked me to be one. But the letter the law entitles him to send writes itself, so I wrote it. Jarrell, copy it, sign it, and send it. The statute does the rest.
To the Championships Committee of the World Boxing Association:
I write pursuant to 15 U.S.C. § 6307c(b) of the Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act to formally question the World Boxing Association’s current rating of me in the heavyweight division.
On April 25, 2026, I defeated Lenier Pero at the Fontainebleau Las Vegas in a bout sanctioned by the WBA, publicly promoted as a WBA heavyweight title eliminator, and clearly presented to me and my representatives as a final title eliminator. The WBA’s published July 2026 heavyweight rankings listed me as the division’s official mandatory challenger. The WBA has since issued a public statement, titled “Clarification: Heavyweight Division,” describing that listing as an inadvertent error and stating that the bout was not a final eliminator.
Under the statute, I request that within seven days you provide me a written explanation of the organization’s ratings criteria, my rating, and the rationale or basis for it, including responses to the following specific questions:
- What status was my April 25, 2026 bout against Lenier Pero sanctioned as, and what did my victory in that bout earn me under WBA rules?
- Who approved the eliminator designation under which the bout was promoted, and was any distinction between an eliminator and a final eliminator communicated to me or my representatives before the bout?
- Who prepared and approved the July 2026 rankings listing me as the official mandatory challenger, and how did the stated error occur?
- On whose authority, and under what provision of the WBA’s rules, was that listing reversed?
- What sanctioning fees did the WBA collect from me or my representatives in connection with the April 25, 2026 bout, what were those fees collected for, and has any refund or payment of any kind been offered or discussed in connection with my rating or the mandatory position?
- Have any step-aside arrangements or payments been proposed, discussed, or approved by the WBA in connection with the heavyweight mandatory position?
- The corrected rankings list me at No. 2, directly behind the mandatory challenger. What is my path from that position to a mandatory position or world title opportunity in the WBA heavyweight division, and what must I do that my April 25, 2026 victory did not already accomplish?
As the statute requires, please provide a copy of your written explanation to the Association of Boxing Commissions and Combative Sports.
Jarrell Miller
And understand how lucky Miller is to have even this much. McCain’s law applies to sanctioning organizations. A fighter wronged by a league’s internal rankings, the PFL model, or the unified boxing organizations the Muhammad Ali American Boxing Revival Act would create, has no statute at all. The Senate version of that bill deleted the one section that imposed new rules on the bodies that hand out titles. Miller himself warned that fighters are losing faith in the sanctioning system and that new organizations are stepping in. He is right, and the irony is that the new organizations he is describing would owe him even less than the WBA does. The only federal rankings protection any boxer has is the 26-year-old one the WBA is testing right now, and Congress is not strengthening it.
Miller earned his spot in a ring, over 12 rounds, at 38, against an opponent nobody had beaten. The WBA took it back with a document and an apology. Now he is asking the WBA president, personally, to make it right. Mendoza should. And if he does not, the letter is above, Jarrell. The seven days are yours to start.
