A League is Born

In what may be the most ambitious move in boxing since an Attorney General told Frankie Carbo that the sport would be better off without him, a world league has formed.

And it pays. Scheduled to begin in November of 2010, it calls itself the World Series of Boxing (WSB) and with 12 teams scattered across the globe in places like Azerbijan, China, Los Angeles, Paris, India and Milan it may, unlike its Americentric baseball namesake, actually live up to that billing.

There are three divisions: Europe, Asia and the Americas, with four teams in each—though the exact location of the would be teams has been somewhat fluid. Sites in London, New York, Chicago and Boston have fallen through, but the current lineup of American cities does include Los Angeles, Miami, Mexico City and Memphis, Tennessee.

Boxers in the WSB are required to sign three year contracts and salaries are said to range around $25,000 per year, with an additional $5,000 for each win, $1000 for each loss—though there is talk of adjustments to take account of the cost of living differences across the world that sound like significantly less dollars if you live in Bombay: “We have been struggling to regulate salaries and a salary cap. India’s money is worth different from the United States and France. It will be about $25,000 a year not including prize money per boxer,” said a Mr. Ivan Khodabakhsh, the Chief Operating Officer of the WSB in a recent interview. There is also talk in some of the dailies about a pay ceiling of $300,000—but it is not clear to me how one would get there from here—unless the championships pay big.

Participation is limited to boxers who have yet to fight a pro bout, and, with the league owned primarily by the International Boxing Association (AISA)— the governing body of Olympic boxing—perhaps not surprisingly, participation will not exclude a league boxer from later fighting in the Olympics. The league is a for profit affair— or at least it seeks to be.

The bouts are scheduled for 5 rounds, three minutes apiece without headgear. Scoring is on a ten point must system and will be visible after each round. There will be no draws and Olympic anti-doping rules will be in effect.

The four teams in each division are scheduled to engage each other (teams or not, no one “plays” boxing) four times during the course of the regular season, which will run from November 19th to March 19th—which equals out to twelve matches over the course of 14 weeks. The top two teams from each division enter the playoffs, culminating in a championship match scheduled in the Chinese city of Macau—gambling capital of The East.

The league will also hold individual championships—7 rounds— at each of its only five weight classes. That’s right, only five: bantamweight , 54kg/ 119lbs; lightweight 61kg/135lbs; middleweight 73kg/160lbs; light heavyweight 85kg/187lbs; and heavyweight 91kg/201+ lbs. The five individual champions will be awarded automatic berths into the Olympics.

Having seen Olympic boxing, or more pointedly, the judging in Olympic boxing, I’m a little reluctant to throw my proverbial hat into the league’s ring. But truth be told, I’ve seen judge’s cards in a number of pro fights these last few years that might have made even Frankie Carbo blush. Having said that, if there were a match anywhere closer to Newark, New Jersey than Memphis, Tennessee I’d find a way to get ringside.

Exercising what the poet Keats called “negative capability,” or the capacity for accepting uncertainty and the unresolved (yes, I’m thinking about the judges again), I find myself intrigued and heartened by the prospect of the WSB.

Even beyond the fact that winning will be at least five times better than losing for a boy wearing gloves, the league has a number of things to recommend it— not the least of which is that it’s the culmination of an idea uttered back in the 1950’s by the denizens of Stillman’s Gym and the Neutral Corner, the famous New York boxing bar a few blocks down from Stillman’s.

The great A.J. Liebling wrote:

“The immediate crisis in the United States, forestalling the one high living standards might bring on, has been caused by the popularization of a ridiculous gadget called television. This is utilized in the sale of beer and razor blades. The clients of the television companies [advertisers], by putting on a free boxing show almost every night of the week, have knocked out of business the hundreds of small-city and neighborhood boxing clubs where youngsters had a chance to learn their trade and journeyman to mature their skills. Consequently the number of good new prospects diminishes with every year, and the peddlers’ public is already being asked to believe that a boy with perhaps ten or fifteen fights behind him is a topnotch performer. Neither advertising agencies nor brewers, and least of all the networks, give a hoot if they push the Sweet Science back into the period of genre painting. When it is in a coma they will find some other way to peddle their peanuts.”

Fifty some-odd years later with Liebling’s coma circuit complete, the Heavyweight Champion of the World is fighting only on the internet here in the United States. Peanuts peddled decidedly elsewhere.
And the managers, trainers and ex-fighters at Stillman’s and the Corner? Liebling writes:

One school of savants holds that if the television companies are going to monopolize boxing they should set up a system of farm clubs to develop new talent. Another believes the situation will cure itself, but painfully. ‘Without the little clubs, nobody new will come up,’ a leader of this group argues. ‘The television fans will get tired of the same bums, the Hooper will drop, the sponsors will drop boxing, and then we can start all over again.’”

And maybe that’s what the World Series of Boxing is: a system of farm teams looking to start all over again.

Rocky Graziano’s manager, Irving Cohen, put it well: “Fighting is like education. The four-round fights are elementary school. Six rounders is high school. Feature bouts is college, but nowadays without the small clubs we got too many boys in college without sufficient preparation.”
So maybe we can look at the WSB as a kind of global prep school— teaching sweet science.