By Lucian Parfitt

Boxing has slipped down the pecking order in recent years, and one thing is certain, the boxing dominion has contributed to its own downfall. You have to love this sport of ours you really do, and you can not blame sports fans who ignore it. In football for example, Chelsea are currently the best team in England as they are top of the league, or in Tennis, Roger Federer is the best, most consistent player as he is No.1 ranked.

Sport is all about rivalries and desires to be the best, and for the public to truly get into the drama, they have to know what’s what. An uninitiated fan may be believe Ricky Hatton is the worlds best light welterweight, or even more alarmingly that Clinton Woods is the best light heavyweight in the World. Glencoffe Johnson and Antonio Tarver should not have to relinquish there world titles to decide who is the world's best!

In my opinion of course, Boxing is the most intrinsically fascinated sport there is. If you walk down the street and two people are kicking a football around, and then two people start throwing punches at each other you can guarantee where the crowd will be. However crude this assessment might be, there is no purer form of sport than boxing, sadly though, none so brutal.

Boxing’s waning popularity has often been pointed to societies increasing repulsion to its violence. But lets be honest we haven’t changed that much since the 80’s or early 90’s. The reason I’m sure of this is intrinsic to the very nature of the sport. Boxing is a sport that has left some of its greatest exponents broken, it has suffered many events of serious injury and death, but this drama, this sense of danger is exactly its appeal.

The fall in popularity is partially the standard of fighters and personalities. But when the public know what they are getting they respond with great numbers (last Saturdays fight between Morales and Pacquiao being a case in point).

The public need to know the fighters they are watching, and they need to know their level. If Mathew Barney vs. Tony Oakey for example is billed as a world title fight it may attract the interest from the less well informed but it may also lead these same people to think  “is the best Boxing has to offer?” and immediately be turned off. If a viewer watches the same content billed as a British title fight, not only does it rightly give greater credence to the British title, it doesn’t downgrade a world title, most importantly, no ones being cheated. Falsely billing an event to attract short term viewers is the sort of short sighted opportunism that sums up Boxing’s current handling  

The simplest way to rid us of this complicated quandary is to have one authority in Boxing. 

We all know there should be one champion in each of Boxing’s weight divisions; the problem with having so many questionable authorities in boxing is essentially there is no authority. There is no strong centralized authority in boxing; there are literally thousands of factions, none of them looking out for the long term health of the sport. Simply looking out for there own lucrative short term investments.

There is simply no gameplan in Boxing, just a multiplicity of groups and individuals essentially looking out for number one.

More so, of all sportsmen, boxers put themselves at more direct risk, despair and pain. Most come from poverty, very little education, so why do they compete in the only major sport that is not unionized.

The emergence of a single, effective boxing commission is what is so obviously needed. A commission that is responsible the sports ethics and image, and has genuine authority to standardize the rules. This is what the sport truly needs if it is going to drag itself out of the sewer, it need not be a dream, but in this sport the only thing that brings about change is green. The mentality of many in authority is a rather stale shade of yellow.