Every ill plaguing the sport could be solved by ending a promoter?s ability to sign exclusive deals with specific fighters?
What if I told you that I could fix the sport of boxing from one day to the next? I?m talking about a complete reform?from being the red light district of sports to holding a place in the mainstream world right below football, basketball, and baseball. No more screw jobs, fixes, or easy-street matchmaking. The fans would get the fights they want to see and the fighters would make just as much, if not more, money.
The secret to killing any con job?and much of what goes on in boxing can be described as a con?is to take the money out of it.
In the case of boxing, the beginning and end of all grift lies with the promoter?s exclusive contract with his fighters. End the ability to sign exclusive promotional deals with fighters and there would be little money to be had in manipulating the system.
The promoter?s job, obviously, is to promote (although you wouldn?t know it from the often shoddy job boxing promoters do). When a promoter is tied to one fighter, exclusively, his focus shifts from making a quality fight to making his guy look good?two often mutually exclusive concepts.
Essentially, the current system encourages the promoter to act as a second manager, guiding his guys to bouts good enough to make them look like stars, but not so good as to actually risk a loss. When there?s enough money in a risky fight, the bout usually gets made. However, more and more, the temptation is to keep a fighter far away from the most challenging fights and grow rich off the corpses of second and third-tier fighters until he absolutely, positively has no choice but to step up (often against a promotional stablemate in a passing of the torch-type bout).
This need to protect their investment also leads to some of the shadier stuff, like poor scoring and the usual madness that comes from the sanctioning bodies. Please spare me the bunk about poor judging always being as a result of incompetence rather than corruption. When a promoter foots the bill for the officiating and basically has the power to hand-pick the judges, you?d have to be a fool to rule out corruption?especially seeing as how the ?bad? scoring always seems to work to the lead promoter?s benefit.
But the spotty matchmaking, rotten scoring, and just about every other ill plaguing the sport could be solved by ending a promoter?s ability to sign exclusive deals with specific fighters.
The end of exclusive promotional deals would force promoters to bid on fights rather than fighters. Suddenly, it would be in their best financial interest to make quality fights.
With the promoters having no vested interest in the outcome of the bouts they make, there?d be no need for any shenanigans. As a matter of fact, it would actually be in the promoter?s best interest to have quality officiating and honest judging.
Obviously, some fighters would have a natural affinity for one particular promoter, but the end of the exclusive contract would allow them the freedom to explore other opportunities.
For example, Terence Crawford, not forced to live with the career decisions made for him by promoter Bob Arum, would be free to negotiate for the biggest, best fights available and not just the biggest, best fights made available to him by Arum. He could work out a deal with, literally, any fighter in the world. And Arum, in turn, would have similar freedom. The only limitations for either would revolve around whether the bout is salable to the boxing public and appealing to a TV network.
I?m not so naive as to think that this idea is workable under the current system where everything is rigged to the benefit of the promoter, but it?s certainly worth pursuing and/or investigating by voices much louder than mine. If the mainstream boxing media were not solely interested in stroking their own egos and/or loading their pockets with as much free swag as possible, this is something that could be shared with fans and debated in public. Maybe it dies a quick death as something utterly impractical or, maybe, it leads to some tweak in the current business model.
As one particularly douchey scribe once told me, though, I?m probably just shooting spitballs at a battleship with any idea that questions the status quo in boxing. Oh well?a dreamer can dream, right?
