By Larry Goldberg
After half a year covering a bill with his name on it, the last word should be his.
Muhammad Ali went to Congress more than once about this sport. By 2004, when he sat in a House hearing room for what turned out to be his final appearance on boxing reform, his voice would not carry, so Lonnie read his statement into the record.
What is striking, reading it now, is what he did not talk about.
He did not talk about championships. He did not talk about his own career, except once, to make a joke at his own expense about being one of the prettiest men on the face of the earth, which Lonnie read aloud and then said, “I didn’t add that.”
He talked about the people nobody watches.
Boxing, he told the subcommittee, “still attracts men and women from all walks of life to reach for glory in the ring. For many it is their first experience with hard work, determination and discipline. For still others it remains the only way up and out from a life filled with bad choices, failure or worse.”
And then: “Armed with the discipline they learned from boxing, many go on to achieve success or even greatness in other professions and raise children who do. They become doctors, lawyers, teachers, or even members of Congress. As in the case of my old friend Nelson Mandela, the courage instilled from boxing allows them to endure great hardship and become great leaders.”
That is a man who had been the most famous athlete alive telling a room full of legislators that the sport’s value was in what it did for people they would never hear of.
He also answered the cost question before anybody raised it, pointing out that the bill he was endorsing funded itself through licensing fees from promoters, sanctioning bodies, and broadcasters. “The added savings in the form of increased boxer safety, more honest business practices and greater public confidence cannot be measured in dollars and cents.”
What he asked them for
The specifics were not sentimental. He praised the federal ID card for one reason, that it stopped a man from getting knocked out in one state and fighting in the next. He told them the laws already on the books were being enforced spottily or not at all. He endorsed the bill that would have put a national medical registry in front of every licensing desk in the country.
Why this publication spent half a year on it
We have written a lot about a medical table this year. About one word in a brain health row, about what Florida requires and what Texas does not, about magnet strength and acuity thresholds and who pays for a scan on an undercard.
It reads like a technical argument because it is one. But here is the reason behind it, and it is the same reason Ali gave a House subcommittee in 2004.
I promote club shows in Atlantic City. The fighters on my cards are not going to be on television. Some of them will win a regional title, some of them will lose more than they win, most of them will be finished by thirty, and every single one of them is putting a body he only gets once into a ring for money that will not change his life.
I have watched state doctors pull fighters at a weigh-in for something nobody else caught. I have had New York suspend a man off one of my own cards, and then watched another state license him anyway. I have learned exactly how much of a fighter’s protection comes down to which state his promoter happened to pick.
That is not an abstraction to anyone who runs a small show. It is the whole job.
What comes next
The bill still has to reach the Senate floor and be reconciled with the House. The medical floor in it is real and it should become law, and it will do the most good in the states that currently do the least, which is most of them.
After that it is a state problem, a commission problem, and an industry problem. Nothing in the federal table stops New Jersey from requiring more, or stops a weak state from writing a real rule, or stops the money in this sport from finally building the file Ali asked for.
He gave that committee a line that has held up better than anything anyone has said about boxing since.
“There is nothing wrong with boxing that we cannot fix.”
He was right. Nobody fixed it. That is not the same thing as being wrong.
Larry Goldberg is the publisher of BoxingInsider.com and a licensed boxing promoter in New Jersey and New York.
