Columnist Dean Juipe: Boxing bill has built-in deficiencies

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at [email protected] or 259-4084.

It can't hurt.

But, no, it really isn't going to help.

In recent days and weeks, considerable fanfare has greeted the passage of the latest boxing reform measure as it worked its way through Congress and eventually into the hands of President Clinton.

Those participants in the process who really know very little about the sport not only felt the need to commend each and every step, they also pronounced this version of the Muhammad Ali bill as one with earth-shaking potential.

But to those observers who have been around the game long enough to actually have a feel for it, the bill was little more than jargon and political hooey.

Like so many of its predecessors, this bill has no shortage of good intentions. Yet, again like its predecessors, it lacks real muscle.

Its downfall is easy to surmise: There is no entity, agency or governmental body with the time and staff to ensure enforcement of its many provisions.

In theory and as stated in the bill, a non-political organization known as the Association of Boxing Commissions has jurisdiction over many of the bill's tenets. It will be up to the ABC to not only insist on adherence, but maybe even to penalize those who betray its policies.

That's all well and good, except for the fact the ABC has no permanent office or staff. It has a director and it conducts meetings among its members, but it is a loosely formed group of representatives from states with an interest in boxing.

It is not a policing agency and doesn't have the personnel to fully police a sport that heretofore has largely run at the whims of its major promoters.

The plus side of the bill and the publicity it has generated is that promoters will at least be aware of its guidelines. They may not adhere to them per se, yet they won't boldly disregard them either.

That part is well and good.

But this is a sport maneuvered by brokers who make handshake and verbal agreements that will never be set down in print, and who, in the past at least, have ruled by autocracy. Government intervention or not, they're unlikely to fully relinquish that power.

The average fan and the typical fighter won't see or notice anything different. It will be business as usual, just as it was when earlier boxing bills went into law without resulting in meaningful change.

There's also a certain, rotten, irony that this bill -- pushed as it was by Arizona senator John McCain -- was signed the very week a city in the pompous senator's jurisdiction lovingly embraced a fight that was deemed too dangerous for Nevada.

Ringworn Julio Cesar Chavez was to have fought a young champion, Kostya Tszyu, here in July, but Nevada's safety first commission put the brakes on those plans. Its members had seen the shell of Chavez and know a bout with Tszyu could have a permanent, negative, impact on the once-great champion. It's a one-round fight and Nevada didn't want it.

Now it's scheduled for July 29 in Phoenix, where Chavez won't face such a demanding commission. If McCain is there for the fight, hopefully he can pull himself away from the glad-handers to see the carnage.

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