Sitting ringside at the B-list Senate hearing, one began to suspect that John McCain, who heroically endured a North Vietnamese prison camp, has met his match in Jose Sulaiman.
There before McCain and Sen. Richard Bryan
(R-Nev.) sat the squat, broad-shouldered Sulaiman, president of an organization called the World Boxing Council.
McCain, a boxing fan, not only has taken on the barons of tobacco but also one of the planet’s most ethically challenged sports. Once as popular as major league baseball, it has descended into a big-money abyss personified by Sulaiman and his longtime chum and professional ally, promoter Don King.
But if you were a layman or a reporter who doesn’t cover sports, Sulaiman would have come off as an intelligent, if exhaustively long-winded, witness opining on the challenges facing the sport, as well as all the high-minded plans possessed by his Juarez, Mexico-based organization.
He might have seemed quite the informed observer, beckoned by a U.S. Senate committee for counsel on how our elected representatives might improve the sport. For sure, it seemed a bit odd that he kept referring to McCain as, “Your Honor,” as if he were a defendant in a court of law. But, otherwise, he came off as reasonable and impassioned.
He spoke of the many fighters who wind up indigent and for whom the council would like to establish a pension fund. “Boxing is for the very poor people of the world, who are rejected by society . . . We love these people,” he said.
He also noted how boxing is a maze of different organizations and can be quite confusing: “We are like the circus.”
What Sulaiman did not say is that he is one of the most powerful ringleaders of the circus, a wheeler-dealer in an industry featuring a recipe for disaster: huge cash transactions, precious few regulations and no single body or commissioner overseeing the sport.
Boxing has always been suspect, but never so much as during the last 20 years. A scandal surfaced in the late 1970s which involved the long-respected rankings found in Ring magazine of boxers in each weight category. The major television networks became wary of touting fights based on those rankings and started turning to several boxing organizations, including the WBC, which also ranked fighters. Over the years, 13 such groups have emerged.
The groups feud with one another and tend not to rank some of those acknowledged by the others. Thus, Sulaiman’s organization doesn’t even deign to acknowledge the obvious in its heavyweight division rankings, namely that Evander Holyfield is the champ.
In trying to explain this absurdity, Sulaiman offered some contorted claim about how his organization has a “rule that no boxer not available for a WBC fight can’t be rated.”
“That’s nonsense,” declared McCain, cutting off his witness. And it is.
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What Sulaiman was alluding to is another factor that complicates boxing these days, namely the clout of the pay-per-view cable channels HBO and Showtime, intense rivals when it comes to locking up top fighters in exclusive deals.
That means they sign certain stars to contracts obligating them to box on their air. Thus, Holyfield is an HBO guy, not generally “available” for a WBC-only charade, while the obvious challenger to his crown, a British fighter named Lennox Lewis, is tied contractually to Showtime.
Which means a fight between those two is unlikely, at least in the near term.
Finally, there are the deals with the rating groups, individual boxers and promoters of individual events, men like King who are acknowledged scoundrels.
“Charlie, I didn’t write the rules, I just play them better than anybody else,” King once told ESPN reporter and longtime boxing observer Charlie Steiner, who recalled the conversation to me Friday in a phone chat.
It’s no surprise that Steiner told his own employer that he had had enough with the sport after covering Mike Tyson biting Holyfield’s ear. And it’s no surprise that McCain offered a brief written statement submitted by Tyson.
“I am currently coming to fully understand how over $65 million was taken from me in less than 24 months. In the six fights I participated in since August of 1995, I never received even 50 percent of my purse money.”
“One of the vehicles through which this was accomplished was a document purporting to allow my promoter (he didn’t mention the name but it’s King) to take 30 percent of all of my gross purse money. I am told that the document violated virtually every state rule governing promoters, but nothing has or is likely to be done.”
Is it really possible that Tyson could be snookered out of that much money?
“Yup,” said Steiner.
It’s possible precisely because promoters continuously hoodwink boxers with contracts that are kept out of sight of state boxing authorities (themselves a mixed lot ethically).
Those pacts might be tantamount to indentured servitude and include various longterm financial guarantees for the promoter if the boxer becomes successful or maybe sticking a promoter’s relative in fat-paying positions (like president of the boxer’s fan club).
This also explains how Marc Ratner, who is executive director of the Nevada State Athletic Commission, could tell me about giving one boxer a $19 million check the night of a big championship bout but not having had a clue where the money was going.
In its supervisory role, the commission knew what the boxer was owed by the promoter but it did not know what the promoter might have demanded from the boxer to set up the fight.
McCain chided the competing boxing organizations with a large chart titled, “A Credible and Consistent Rating System?”
There were the rankings in two weight categories by three of the groups, including Sulaiman’s. Unbelievably, the WBC heavyweight champ is listed as Lewis, not Holyfield, and more amazingly the top contender is a Zeiko Mavrovic of Croatia.
Zeiko Mavrovic of Croatia?
“He can’t even fight a little bit. He couldn’t make it through the Michigan Militia in a strong man contest,” Michael Katz, boxing writer for the New York Daily News, said Friday.
As for Sulaiman’s No. 4-ranked heavyweight, it’s Oliver McCall, a fellow who recently had a nervous breakdown in the ring and has battled a crack addiction. “He shouldn’t be rated, he should be cured,” said Katz.
“Ratings are subjective,” Sulaiman said, with a seemingly straight face.
When Bryan underscored the outrage of McCall being considered a legitimate contender, Sulaiman offered a poker face and, “I do respect your feelings, of course.”
McCain was more direct than Bryan, looking at Sulaiman and underscoring the obvious: “Your ratings are meaningless.”
Sulaiman was unmoved. And why should he feel nervous? Even McCain concedes that the reforms he suggests are quite modest and that they are not high on the Senate’s list of priorities.
So the Mexican will be able to keep ranking whomever he wants to rank, cutting deals with the likes of King and making tons of money from “sanctioning fees” on WBC-approved fights–and all the better if they draw a big audience on Showtime or HBO.
It’s all a bit sad for octogenarian Eddie Futch, a benign and grand old man of boxing. Retired, he began training fighters in 1932 and managed or trained 22 world champs over 62 years, including Joe Frazier.
“I look forward to the day when boxers will get a fair shake,” he had told McCain earlier in the morning.
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Don’t hold your breath. You’d be better off betting that McCain can bring the tobacco companies, rather than Sulaiman, to heel.