Congressman Joe Courtney, a 20-year politician, outlined the anti-Zuffa Boxing case in legal terms on Tuesday, March 25 ahead of a vote that passed a Dana White-backed bill called The Muhammad Ali American Boxing Revival Act through the House of Representatives, and to the U.S. Senate, where it must also pass before becoming law.
The original Ali Act from 2000 focused on fighter protection, and enforced a separation between promoters, managers, and sanctioning bodies to prevent conflicts of interest, ensure financial transparency, and give boxers legal recourse.
Advocates of Revival Act say that those protections remain but, in their version, creation of a Unified Boxing Organization (UBOs) allows a single entity — like TKO Group’s Zuffa league — to promote fights, control rankings, and award titles while adding minimum pay and insurance standards. Insiders that Boxing Social editor Alan Dawson has spoken to before described it once as a “power grab.”
On March 24, that power grab got ever closer. However, one dissenting voice — Courtney’s — ran through his opposition to the bill.
“[It] radically amends the existing Muhammad Ali Act which was passed in 2000,” Courtney started. “That law established statutory protections for boxers from exploitative and unethical business practices … the committee received expert testimony … and warned us this bill will strip away many of these hard-fought reforms.
“[The Revival Act] creates a new parallel legal structure, the so-called [UBO] which can engage in promotion, rule-setting, match-organization and creation of their own titles and rankings. Under existing law … these functions have been required to remain separate to protect against conflicts of interest and coercive contract terms for boxers.
“[A UBO] will replicate a model which has been extremely lucrative in mixed martial arts sports [like UFC] which operate with few legal and economic protections for fighters leading to a long history of litigation and allegations of anticompetitive practices, long-term contracts, forced arbitration, and class-action waivers.”
Courtney said the original act had “crowning achievements” and one of which “was the establishment of a boxer’s right to a private clause of action to assert their rights which all Americans enjoy to seek legal redress for unlawful injuries. [This bill] fails to protect these protections within UBOs.
He then countered the notion that the Revival Act had widespread support, which it doesn’t, with an approximate 33:67 split of insiders Boxing Social has spoken to for, and against, the bill. Courtney held up letters from Top Rank boss Bob Arum, and USA Boxing, which Boxing Social had previously published, to support this.
Nine members of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce spoke about the bill on the House floor on Tuesday. Eight were supportive or neutral, with only Courtney in opposition.
WHAT TO READ NEXT:
