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Pastimes : Boxing: The Sweet Science -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jorj X Mckie who wrote (3595)	5/5/2001 4:03:16 PM
From: LPS5	Respond to of 10489

Control of sanctioning bodies within reach by Royce Feour Saturday, May 05, 2001 Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal To better regulate boxing, the sport's sanctioning organizations must be controlled. With that in mind, the Nevada Athletic Commission about 1 1/2 years ago asked the Nevada attorney general's office to conduct a study of the various alphabet organizations. The study has been completed and sent to Gov. Kenny Guinn, and it provides the best look available on how the sanctioning organizations are structured. "To the best of my knowledge, this is the most comprehensive report on sanctioning bodies by any state commission or any other country's commission," said Marc Ratner, executive director of the commission. Eleven sanctioning organizations were asked to provide information to the commission about their constitution and bylaws, whether they were nonprofit or for-profit, a list of officers and officials, how their rankings are formulated, the total amount of sanctioning fees they collected and their tax-return records, as well as other information. The commission will have more power over the sanctioning bodies if Assembly Bill 446 is approved by Nevada lawmakers. The bill was passed unanimously in the Assembly last month and is awaiting a hearing in the Senate. Dr. Elias Ghanem, chairman of the commission, said the bill would give the commission needed authority. "Until now, they have had a free hand in doing whatever they wanted to do without our knowledge," Ghanem said of the sanctioning groups. "If we want some information, we would like to have them come and just give us the information. This is nothing against the sanctioning bodies, just something the commission and the state of Nevada needs to be able to control boxing and control our rules and regulations." The sanctioning bodies can be arrogant, and some withheld information. "Not only were they lax, but at times they refused to give us all of the information they were asked for," Ghanem said. He said some organizations were better than others about providing information. The World Boxing Council and its president, Jose Sulaiman, have taken some heat over the years, but commissioner Flip Homansky said the WBC was by far the organization most cooperative. "If they are going to have fights in the state, we would like to know who owns the organization, who they are, and if they are for-profit or not-for-profit," Ghanem said. "Anybody can just up and have a world organization." Ghanem is right about the last part. You could start your sanctioning organization tomorrow. All you have to do is go to Kmart and buy a fancy-looking belt, look in a boxing magazine and copy some rankings, work out of your home, sanction championship fights and collect some lucrative sanction fees. It has been done before. Unless a local state commission stands up to the sanctioning bodies, as Nevada long has done, they tend to run rampant over local commissions, including the area of appointing referees and judges. Homansky said AB446 would give the commission knockout power over the sanctioning groups. "What this gives us the ability to do, if there is an egregious act by a sanctioning organization, we can pull the license and they can no longer have fights here," Homansky said. Don't think the sanctioning organizations won't sit up and take notice of Nevada's authority because the collection of sanction fees is big business in the state. The attorney general's office found that from 1996 to 2000 five selected organizations sanctioned 124 championship fights in Nevada and collected $8.85 million in sanction fees for those fights. Who wants to run a sanctioning body now?

To: Jorj X Mckie who wrote (3595)	5/5/2001 4:19:41 PM
From: LPS5	Respond to of 10489

Hey Jorj m'man, I know exactly what you mean about Vargas' liking to fight ("the eye of the tiger," if you will), and the opinion that his loss to Tito is no disgrace. Agreed. And, let me preface this little soliloquy by saying that, in general, I like what Vargas brings to the ring. Two things I'd add, though: first, that in the last year, my longstanding valuation for that "steely-eyed killer" quality that many fighters exhibit has been eroded, particularly in the cases of Corrales, Etienne, and Vargas. All three guys showed (and expressed, often loudly) a willingness, a relish, toward mixing it up, and consequently got whipped all the same. Losing to Trinidad is no disgrace, but fighting flatfooted and wide-eyed - and, to say the least, going down 3 times in the first round - I believe is worthwhile of a raising of eyebrows all round. He did make it to the last round, and he did catch Tito a few times, knocking him down once, but all said, it was a substandard performance from what I was expecting. Second, that the focal point of my pick of Rivera as the victor tonight is twofold. The first leg is the "psychology play": how bad was the damage done to Vargas' ego in the last loss? I'm speculating that he's deeply shaken, enough so that the aggressiveness he'll need won't be there; or, if it is, that it will come at the cost of his protection, leaving him sloppy and clumsy. The second, the "veteran" play - one I don't play often: does Rivera's experience render him skilled and crafty or washed-up and crusty? As stated, I think this guy - having watched three of the four fights I cited - has a plethora of strategies to draw upon, and that his "well" still has 24 or so rounds of sweet, nectary goodness left in it. And...incidentally...my picking underdog Rahman to beat Lewis has nothing to do with this sequential selection of an underdog victory ;-) I believe that Rivera will KO or stop Vargas on or about the 9th round, and that the result will echo in much the same way the Oleg Maskaev's KO to Kirk Johnson was followed up by his KO at the hands of Lance "Mount" Whitaker. LPS5