By Mike Casey

I do not want to get into Ultimate Fighting. I am too fond of subtlety, shades and hues and deft skill.

I do not want to get into Mixed Martial Arts (MMA), because I am already up to my neck in initials and do not care for two men kicking and thrashing at each other and making a lot of guttural noises while they go about it.

I love my boxing, thank you very much. For all its warts and scabs, I always will. I just want it to get over its present sickness, because I do not hold the pessimistic view that it is a terminally ill patient.

Some time ago, trainer Kenny Weldon opened his heart and wrote the following: “Fans and boxing people alike evidently do not realise the state of disgrace we have all achieved around the world.

“It’s not just that we are no longer producing the world class talent we once did, the opponent has unified forces against us. The Bin Laden of boxing has become the boxing commissions. They now allow just anyone to train and/or manage boxers. Even our amateur boxing coaches must take a clinic on safety, fundamentals and all aspects of the sport and pass it before they are allowed to work a boxer’s corner or run a boxing club.

“The professional boxing commissions do none of this. I have met more professional managers, matchmakers and trainers in the past five years who knew as much about the sport they represent as Abraham Lincoln knew about space flight.”

For the benefit of those of you who don’t know, Kenny Weldon was a good class featherweight of the seventies who notched 42 wins in his 50 pro fights in a ten-year career. He currently owns the Galena Park Boxing Academy in Houston and doesn’t care for much of what he sees in the greater boxing world beyond.

Sentiments

Like Kenny Weldon, I have nothing against the fighters of today. I love boxers and boxing as dearly as I have ever done.

I have everything against the increasingly gauche and tacky circus in which they are required to parade their wares.

Whatever made boxing want to be like wrestling? In my youth, the two sports went hand in hand and more or less shared space in all the popular magazines. Even The Ring magazine carried a wrestling section for years, until the boxing fans persuaded the editors to get rid of it. Followers of the sweet science didn’t wish to be associated with a long devalued sister sport which had degenerated into a synthetic and largely pre-arranged farce. Wrestling was about guys in silly masks and silly trunks making overblown entries to the ring and trading cheap and badly acted insults with their opponents. God forbid that boxing should ever go that way. Ho-hum.

One doesn’t have to travel back to the year dot to uncover the former glory. In fact we can stop the clock in 1969, when man landed on the moon and folks in general weren’t entirely boring. Just recently I re-visited that memorable fight between Joe Frazier and Jerry Quarry at Madison Square Garden, which offers emphatic proof for me that the excitement and sense of anticipation in that era was far greater than it is today, simply for being more restrained and considerably more dignified.

The presentational aspect of modern boxing might seem to be a cosmetic and somewhat trite issue compared to its larger and more significant warts, but much of our present troubles have sprung from the depressing drop in general standards.

Watching Frazier and Quarry limber up, the first thing that struck me was the vastness of the ring. That was because it wasn’t filled with people who weren’t supposed to be there. The boxers and seconds were in their corners and only moved a step further when referee Arthur Mercante motioned them to join him. Mercante was brief in his reminder of the rules and finished by saying a simple, “Take care.”

That was it. The fight was on. Two fighters who were lean and mean, quietly menacing but well behaved, went to war. There was nothing in their pre-fight demeanour that besmirched the sport or incited the crowd. Johnny Addie, one of the great ring announcers, did his bit sparingly and with class as he told us all we ever want to know: hometown of each fighter, colour of trunks, weights. End of story. Addie never felt the urge to linger forever in mid-ring in the hope of stealing the spotlight and becoming a ‘star’. Nor did he mangle the names of the contestants.

The nearest comparison we have to Johnny Addie now is Jimmy Lennon Jnr, whose old man wasn’t too shabby as a ring announcer either. Everyone else, it seems, is now addicted to the dreadful drug of holding on to a fighter’s name in the way that Roy Orbison applied his enviable grip to a high note.

The fighters themselves are in no way blameless for enabling the circus to flourish and expand its range of tasteless products for the brain-dead and the transient tribe of dilettantes who now seem to constitute the target audience of the controlling bodies and the major media moguls.

The ring attire of many fighters today is no longer harmlessly amusing or original. It is gaudy and downright ridiculous.

What is so offensive about dignity and class? Frazier and Quarry looked like the real fighters they were when they clashed on that hot summer night at the Garden. They were superbly trained, tight as racehorses and looked deadly serious and manly in every way.

A fighter does not look dignified when he is wearing a pair of trunks that extend from just below his nipples to his calves. He does not look macho when he is wearing a creation that can only be described as a skirt. At best he looks like a pimp, at worst he looks like a half-hearted transvestite. One of Mike Tyson’s redeeming features was that he never engaged in that kind of nonsense.

NFL players must adhere to strict rules when taking to the gridiron. They are permitted to grow beards and wear their hair any length they wish, as is any man’s right unless the circumstances are exceptional. What players cannot do is to disrespect their uniforms. Even their shirts must be tucked in at all times. Is it too much to ask that we have at least some form of dress code in boxing?

Corners

Kenny Weldon quite rightly laments the increasing invasion of the sport by self-styled managers and trainers. A fighter’s corner should be a place of calm and reason, especially in a crisis. How many times now do we see three guys shouting different instructions at a troubled fighter in a scene of utter chaos? When a boxer is reeling from one of Jose Luis Castillo’s Sunday best, a meaningless cry of, “You da man!” isn’t going to do that much for his self-belief.

When Kevin Rooney was working the young Mike Tyson’s corner, the sense of serenity was almost palpable. Jack Blackburn, Eddie Futch, Yancy Durham and Gil Clancy were great and knowledgeable trainers who knew exactly how to motivate their fighters and moderate the corner.

When George Foreman deprived Joe Frazier of his title in Kingston, Big George’s corner was a sanctuary in all the bedlam. Small wonder, since it was inhabited by Dick Sadler, Archie Moore and Sandy Saddler. Prior to the fateful second round, Foreman rose from his stool with one quiet and simple instruction in his ear: “Drop that hammer on him, George.”

It is so important that the good men of today like Freddie Roach, Buddy McGirt and that excellent London ace of a trainer, Johnny Eames, continue to prevail and multiply their numbers.

Eames is a wonder, a classic throwback to the great trainers of yesteryear. Johnny knows the game thoroughly, issues his instructions with firmness and great calm and treats his fighters like his sons.

There is never any panic in a Johnny Eames corner. He even hands out the occasional admonishment with a nice balance of authority and good humour.

Strive

So much is still great and uplifting about professional boxing. More than ever before, I believe we need to stand up for the good side of the old game whilst having the courage to face down and condemn its ugly sister. We cannot simply ignore the gaping cracks in the road in the misguided belief that acknowledging their existence would be aiding the abolitionists.

Like a clever computer virus, the ugliness has become depressingly diversified as it courses through boxing’s bloodstream. The behaviour of the politically motivated world boxing organisations is frequently appalling and has been so for years.

When you know the game well, you know the terrible things that go on, many of which you cannot report unless you are wealthy enough to employ some seriously heavyweight lawyers. When Bert Sugar was editing The Ring, he courageously ran stories on the grubby machinations of the game’s ruling bodies. Whatever one thinks of dear old Bert, he has always had courage. He ripped into the likes of Jose Sulamain with all the relish of a hungry shark. And where is Mr Sulamain now? Why, in our once esteemed Hall of Fame, of course, presumably for good services rendered to boxing.

Like Nat Fleischer before him, Sugar had teeth and was not afraid to sink them into rotten flesh. Where are such men now? Trade editors today routinely fill their magazines with results, lots of pictures and flattering profiles, most of which is old hat by press day in the age of the Internet and 24/7 news.

The British Boxing News is now virtually little more than a weekly record book. The Ring magazine, for all the gutsy and sterling efforts of Nigel Collins, has never regained its former status as the heavyweight hitter of the industry. This, to me, is a great shame.

Poor Nigel doesn’t lord it in a nice big office over Madison Square Garden as Fleischer once did. But Collins does try his best and is not afraid to throw mean left hook at the sport’s rotten apples. Yes, it is in his best interests to promote the Ring and its admirable world ranking policy. But having followed his career since the distant days of the seventies, I can tell you that he cares deeply about the welfare of boxing.

We need more like him, but we don’t have them. We have slipped into an era of lazy writers and lazy writing, where the odious issues of the day are only half-heartedly addressed and coated in dollops of sarcasm and smart-ass one-liners. Some of it is mildly amusing and makes us chuckle. But it doesn’t stop the rot.

Could you honestly tell any two boxing ‘writers’ apart these days if their by-lines were removed from the articles? I’ll be damned if I could. Where are the individual journalists who yearn to be masters of their trade and distinguish themselves from the rest?

Even the television networks shy away from controversy. Teddy Atlas and the honourable Jim Watt do their best on either side of the Atlantic, but other ex-fighters who guest as commentators are swiftly hushed up if they should so much as suggest that a judge is either blind or plain bent for producing a scorecard that defies belief.

The alphabet soup boys cry foul and call their lawyers at the mere mention of the word ‘corrupt’, yet any supposedly independent boxing body is corrupt from the first time it produces a set of world rankings that are not based on merit alone. It is corrupt when it asks a deserving challenger for the title to stump up a ‘sanctioning fee’. No other mainstream sport I can think of entertains that kind of garbage. Does Tiger Woods have to kick back a percentage of his winnings to the Augusta National Golf Club when he wins The Masters?

Alas, it is all too easy to form a world boxing authority. Pat O’Grady managed the feat as far back as 1981 when his son Sean was stripped of the WBA lightweight title. Pat invented the World Athletic Association – quite possibly during his lunch break – and appointed Sean as lightweight champion. Sean’s first defence was against Hawaiian hitter Andrew Ganigan, who knocked him out in two rounds. An unhappy ending for the O’Gradys, but a very disturbing point had been made.

Few things now make sense to sensible boxing folk, as the bully boys continue to get their way and tear and twist at every tradition. The evidence of their destruction hits us between the eyes from every direction.

The number of weight divisions (seventeen) is absurd, and the number of champions no less so. This senseless proliferation has left us with a depressingly low depth of talent and has unrealistically prolonged the careers of many fighters who really aren’t that exceptional and never were. Nearly every fight now has to be for some kind of championship, however worthless. Nothing seems to scare promoters more than staging a good old-fashioned ten rounds non-title bout.

In the eighties, the classic championship limit of fifteen rounds was abandoned by those who apparently care for the health of boxers, following a couple of high profile ring fatalities in Johnny Owen and Deuk Koo Kim. Johnny was knocked out in the twelfth round by Lupe Pintor, while Kim was KO’d in the fourteenth by Ray Mancini.

Has that measure helped to protect boxers? Of course it hasn’t. Preliminary boys are now fighting gruelling twelve-rounders after only six or seven fights because there is always some meaningless title up for grabs. They simply aren’t given sufficient time to accustom themselves to eight and ten round fights and adapt to the longer distances. Many burn out long before they should. The great fighters find a way of plugging such holes in their education and flourishing on any given playing field, but these missing links can prove costly for lesser boxers who need more time to learn the ropes and progress.

We repeatedly hear of boxers approaching ‘must win’ fights. Why must they win? With all those titles sloshing around, there is always another chance just down the road. The obsessive ‘0’ on a prospect’s record has assumed ridiculous importance. Even an educational defeat is deemed a minor disaster. Too much pressure is placed on young fighters to thrill and please, to the point where any tactical game plan goes immediately out of the window. All the time, I see skilful boxers with significant height and reach advantages becoming locked in punishing wars of attrition at close quarters.

Erik Morales, a wonderful fighter and an all-time great in this writer’s opinion, could have enjoyed a significantly longer career if he had not felt the obligation to wage so many pointless wars.

Here’s another question for you. Why are we so outraged when fighters are a few pounds over the limit at the weigh-in? With the luxury of twenty-four hours to spare, they are only going to feast at the local burger bar and come into the ring massively overweight anyway. I do chuckle when commentators behold a featherweight and innocently exclaim, “My word, he looks like a welter from the waist up!”

Stop

It is not impossible to stop all this nonsense, and we must never tell ourselves that it is. What does seem impossible is the task of stopping the good people of boxing from warring amongst each other instead of attacking the criminals. As Kenny Weldon observes, “We cannot agree on anything.”

In the United States, the biggest boxing fish in the sea, a rescue act is especially urgent. If we are ever to move forward and cut out the cancerous growths, we need to commit once and for all to a definitive solution, even if it means inheriting one problem for every two we solve.

The greatest brains in the game, and there are a great many of them, need to form their own round table and hammer something out. Camelot won’t come out of it, because boxing can never be that and we wouldn’t want it to be. The sport can never afford to lose its roguish, outlaw charm or its glorious mix of characters. Its anarchic nature is as appealing as it is frustrating, one of the curious qualities that so shiningly sets it apart.

That is why, in my view, federal control of boxing in America is an eternal Catch-22 proposition. Apart from the usual few good men, today’s politicians can often be as distasteful and dishonest as the people they are paid to throw in jail. The one thing we do not need is better regulated corruption by way of political appointments and politically motivated policy decisions, leaving us with nothing more than a sanitised and bureaucratic façade.

How I fervently wish that I could offer an all-embracing solution to boxing’s problems. To my constant exasperation, I am unable to do so. I am a lone ranger with little influential muscle and can only make recommendations. The multi-layered composition of the disease is too challenging a conundrum for yours truly and most others. That is why the great thinkers and the genuine lovers of boxing must come together, see eye to eye and start fighting the good fight.

Boxing will never be stopped or expunged, for the simple reason that men will always fight. Prostitution will similarly endure because certain people will always sell their bodies. But do we really want our great game to be compared to an old whore?

The enemy forces should not be underestimated. They learn quickly and know all the management mind games and tricks. Like rust, they never sleep. They are the blue-sky democrats who secretly despise democracy, free speech and fair play. Blue-sky thinking does not permit bad things to be said about bad situations. Speak up, and you are shouted down and labelled an extremist.

We must find a way of sweeping them all away and making them redundant. They have romped in the sun and done their damage for far too long and now they must go.

When Clint Eastwood’s avenging angel evicted the guests of a hotel in the classic Western, High Plains Drifter, the disgusted proprietor told him he couldn’t do it. Where were all the guests supposed to go?

“Out,” Eastwood replied.

Mike Casey is a boxing journalist and historian and a staff writer with Boxing Scene. He is a member of the International Boxing Research Organization (IBRO) and founder and editor of the Grand Slam Premium Boxing Service for historians and fans (www.grandslampage.net).