Is It Really… Corrupt I Mean?

By Donald “Braveheart” Stewart

An opinion piece from the only Donald worth listening to…

Full Stop – In British English grammar a full stop is a lengthy pause, in the US, you call it a period. In the UK that tends to suggest feminine products. Here it means a period of time where
I look at something in boxing in a little more depth. I am typing from my perspective of a fan who watches the sport closely. It’s an opinion. It is my opinion. Don’t like it? There are other opinions out there but if you don’t like it then good, debate and democracy are a good thing. If you do like it, feel free to spread the word.

Is it really… corrupt I mean?

Things you get asked when you need a tap replaced. Part one of one.

A plumber came to the house this last month to sort out the sink in the toilet. Nothing spectacular about that but he asked me a question as we were talking about all things sports related, about boxing. My immediate response was to defend boxing, but it made me think. The question was, is boxing corrupt?

Of course it isn’t, I began but then backtracked pretty quickly.

Let me begin with where I began.

The past.

Can we have escaped the mob influence of the days of America in the 1950’s and 1960’s when the mob held sway? We seem to have moved away from the cartel in the UK as Frank Warren, Frank Maloney and Barry Hearn broke it and heralded in a new era of a new boxing landscape.

Things got better, did they not?

The “phantom” punch which felled Sonny Liston and became an iconic picture as Ali stood above him shouting at him to get up has never been replicated nor a fighter as prominent as Liston been associated with taking a dive, has there? Fighters are cleaner, meaner and fitter than ever before and regulatory bodies have greater sanctions, involvement and testing to keep things clean?

Even as I type that I feel naïve.

For boxing has an issue or two. In fact, it has many.

People who tune in occasionally to watch boxing seem to generally shout fix when things go wrong. And those of us “in the know” need to accept that sometimes it is the right call.

Let’s begin with management. Carl Frampton admitted in his court case against the McGuigans that he signed for MTK because they charged nothing. A global brand by the time he signed, MTK had a huge stable of fighters, a headquarters in Marbella and then in Dubai, with a controversial figure head. Daniel Kinahan. Kinahan is widely believed to be the head of a massive drug cartel. Some are convinced that he is a gangster in the mold of the likes of Frankie Carbo and Blinky Palermo of the post war American markets.

It is important to say allegedly, because Kinahan has not been convicted of the crimes he has been with which he is associated or of which he is accused. This is perhaps because he is a fugitive and has not faced those accusations in a court. In boxing, he has been widely praised by a number of fighters for his part in helping their careers – including Tyson Fury. Boxing could do with closure over this controversial figure in the shadows.

But boxing itself is no saint when it comes to corruption. Boxing in the Olympics is in jeopardy because of that. The visual of Mick Conlan flipping the bird at judges when he lost in the Olympics, his post-fight rant and then the official reading of the report into corruption which stripped AIBA of their right to judge amateur boxing contests are the headlines. The fact is that officials representing AIBA were caught cheating. The Olympics had to organize judging at the last Olympics and a new organization World Boxing needs to win its right to judge amateur boxing moving forward.

Professionally we have two other massive issues, one of which is close enough to the Olympics to feel like it has connections with it – scorecards and Performance Enhancing Drugs (PEDs)s.
Judging is subjective. People can score a fight one way or another depending upon if you prefer the cute peek a boo or the come forward aggressive, the boxing purists’ style or the brawler wanting to make an impact.

When there is a clear winner, and the scorecards reflect that nobody really cares. If there are 10 cards in 10 venues with 10 fights each across the country, a small proportion of those get scrutinized. Nobody howls about the 4 rounder the ref gave to the prospect over the journeyman, even though the journeyman beat them. But when it is televised and a daylight robbery – Campbell Hatton v Sonni Martinez springs to mind, or Josh Taylor – Jack Catterall I – then focus comes down upon the ring apron and the three good people given the cash to judge come into focus. But the more boxing struggles to cope with close contests being declared huge wins, the tougher it is to defend it – and that has a great deal to do with the scoring system which nobody can explain simply to a non-boxing person.

Finally, drugs. An age-old problem? A truly new phenomenon? Is enough funding available to test properly? Do we punish the fighters alone or should we include his team? How do we stop performance enhancing drugs in the sport, given the amount of money now on offer for winners and world title challenges in places like Saudi Arabia? People have questioned if Connor Benn lost some spite in his punching when he came back after the controversy and was unable to get his opponents out the ring after being caught with an adverse finding, because he was no longer using PEDs? Did his dad, Nigel, skip a drugs test to hide the fact that he had, back in the day, used PEDs? I have no idea but the narrative being peddled, to get clicks and gain notoriety is easy because boxing is allowing it to be. Without a definitive drive to stop drugs being used in a dangerous sport, we are guilty of not looking after that sport. We are allowing speculation, where none should be. Tyson Fury (uncastrated boar) and Canelo Alvarez (contaminated meat) aside, we have high profile warriors found guilty of cheating. But they still fight and are still champions – because boxing does not have an organization big enough to ban them.

And so, the answer to the question, is boxing corrupt? It probably is. And wishing it wasn’t, isn’t enough to make it become cleaner and better. But it probably is not as dirty as people think it is and the level at which it gets filthy is way above the guy or girl in the gym dreaming of becoming the new belt holder wishing their name above a door, on a poster or in a local ring peddling their wares hoping that a Warren, or a Hearn, even a Hennessey or a Shalom notice them.

But then, when the rewards get bigger and the pressure gets bigger and expectations get bigger, is when things become muddier, and we need to do much better.

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