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Show by Jim Murray MmiDiPayoini pnirtt Who's in charge of boxing? i Everyone, and no one Want to be a boxing champion? Hanker to be the first one in your neighborhood to answer to the title Champ, do you? , Not to worry. Just send a stamped, self-addressed envelope to your nearest "world" boxing authority. State your preference as to weight class, but don't fret over it. If necessary, we'll think one up for you. A list of your opponents would be nice, but not necessary. Experience necessary but not critical. The best thing to do is, have an upcoming bout arranged. One with a television contract. Pledge 2 percent of the gross and voila! instant title fight! The offer comes complete with title belt, certified ranking, all the perks. Check over our selection of what you want to be. Heavyweight champion? Cruiserweight? Light-heavy? Maybe you fancy middleweight? Superwelter? Welter? Superlightweight? Lightweight? Feather? Superfeather? Junior light? Superbantamweight? Bantam? Superfly? Light Flyweight? Junior flyweight. Or, leave blank division designation. Listen! You think you know who the heavyweight champion of the world is? The successor to John L Sullivan, Corbett, Dempsey, Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, Muhammad Ali? A name for the ages? Larry Holmes? Don't be silly. He hasn't been champion for a long time. He's just another fighter. A contender, if you will. The heavyweight champion is Pinklon Thomas. You heard me. If you think that's funny, try Gerrie Coetzee. I know Genie Coetzee got beat by John Tate and knocked out by Mike Weaver. I know Larry Holmes has never lost a fight. I know he's beaten Ken Norton, Muhammad Ali, Gerry Cooney, Earnie Shavers and anyone else they cared to throw in the ring with him. I know that. You know that. But the bodies governing boxing and there are more of them every day prefer to ignore that. They have dethroned Larry Holmes for reasons best known to themselves and their treasurers. One of the reasons was, he wouldn't fight Greg Page. Now, there is no sound reason he should fight Greg Page, unless you count it as a battle that would one day live in apathy. But the WBC or was it the WBA? The WAA? The british Board of Boxing Control? The Daughters of the American Revolution? decided he had to fight Greg Page or forfeit his title. Why Greg Page? Well, if you're going to give title fights to Pinklon Thomas and Gerrie Coetzee, why not Greg Page? He's as ineffectual as they are. ' Who do you think is the middleweight champion of the I world? Marvelous Marvin Hagler? Just because he's lost only two fights in his career, and those .back in 1976? No. Marvelous recently knocked out Mustafa Hamsho for the second time in his career but don't be surprised if Mustafa bobs up as "champion" some time soon. You see, Marvelous has been unfrockecl by the World Boxing Council for the most illogical of reasons that he insisted on scheduling his fight with Hamsho for 15 rounds. Now, the scheduled length of that fight was strictly academic. Every student of the fight game knew Mustafa had about as much chance of seeing the 15 th round as he had of spelling onomatopoeia. As it turns out, he missed the 15th round by about an hour. America, the citadel of boxing, is regulated by commissions whose seat of power is the Caribbean, Latin America and other south-of-the-border ports of call. The most powerful of these is ruled by Jose Sulaiman Chagnon, a Mexican businessman of Lebanese-French extraction. Jose's legacy to the fight game so far has been Pinklon Thomas and a whole bunch of bewildering sub-divisions like the super-flyweight, which unkind critics have been moved to suspect were brought into being because television, which is the only money in boxing today, likes the word championship in its prefight promos. No boxer just fights any more. He contests for the junior-supercruiser-light-approximate-cannonweight championship cham-pionship of the world. Please send check or money order for appropriate certification. The heavy hand of officialdom is not new in boxing. The Dempsey-Tunney fight, no less, was run out of New York because the commission there insisted that Jack Dempsey fight a black challenger named Harry Wills in 1926. The commissioners were not distressed that Dempsey had not fought in three years (although that was a clear violation of their defense-every-six-months rule). Nor was there any evidence Wills was particularly qualified. Jack Sharkey whipped him decisively and then Dempsey knocked out Sharkey. But logic is never a condition of commission interference. Sulaiman protests that Hagler was stripped of his championship because the WBC is convinced that 15-round fights are injurious to your health, not to say fatal. Ring fatalities (Ray Mancini vs. Dook-Koo Kim) often occur in the 13th round and beyond, he points out. "Fatigue is the worst enemy of all athletes, not only boxers," he warns. "Fatigue invites injury. The worst fight of all time may have been the late rounds of the Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier fight in Manila. We were lucky to have been spared a tragedy in that one in the 14th round." Opponents of boxing think Joe may be on the right track. Now that he's eliminated three rounds of boxing, if he can just work on the other 12, they'll be content. ' But, failing that, stripping a super-fighter like Hagler of his title because he refused to schedule a fight (that was only going to go two rounds) for 12 is a piece of bogus principle the game can ill afford now. (Even the New York Commission did not vacate Dempsey's title. They only banned him from boxing in New York, which was stupid but only half as stupid. ) With some 30 different champions in almost as many hokey divisions, boxing is becoming as anonymous a sport as pro golf. But history tells us that it will get not what it needs, fewer champions, but what it already killing it, more commissions. (c) 1984, Los Angeles Time. 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