By Boxing Insider Staff<\/p>\n
Fans asking what the new Ali Act bill does about boxing\u2019s four belts, the interim titles, and the alphabet champions now have a clear answer: nothing.<\/p>\n
The Senate version, introduced July 30 by Sens. Ted Cruz and Jacky Rosen<\/a>, removes the title reform that was in the House bill. It is a bipartisan bill, a Republican chairman and a Democratic co-sponsor, and understanding what happened requires walking through what has actually governed the belts, era by era. It is a shorter story than most fans think.<\/p>\n The original Ali Act, passed in 2000<\/a> and still the law today, never limited titles. What it requires from sanctioning organizations is paperwork and transparency: file their ratings criteria with the FTC, explain a rating change when a fighter asks, maintain an appeals process, and disclose their fees. It says nothing about how many champions an organization can crown.<\/p>\n Every WBA regular championship, every WBC franchise designation, every interim belt of the past 25 years was created legally under that law. The four-belt era is not a violation of the Ali Act. It grew up inside it.<\/p>\n John McCain tried a different approach. His Professional Boxing Amendments Act<\/a> passed the Senate twice by unanimous consent, as S. 275 on March 31, 2004, and again as S. 148 on May 9, 2005. Neither version limited how many titles an organization could crown, but both would have put the sanctioning bodies under federal supervision for the first time: every organization would have needed a license from a United States Boxing Commission to sanction fights in America, revocable for violations, and would have followed federal ratings guidelines, with every rating change published and explained to the public and the commission. Break the rules, lose the right to do business in the United States. The House never voted on either bill, and the idea died, as this series detailed this week<\/a>.<\/p>\n Then came this year\u2019s House bill<\/a>, passed by voice vote on March 24, which was the first federal text ever to address the titles head on. Its language was direct. A sanctioning organization or unified boxing organization shall award only one championship title for each weight class, with interim titles permitted only when a champion is genuinely unavailable. Had it become law as written, the regular championships, the franchise designations, and most of the sport\u2019s interim belts would not have been permitted. Four champions per division, one per organization, maximum.<\/p>\n Understand why that provision was existential for the four organizations, because it is not complicated. Sanctioning fees follow titles. Every championship an organization recognizes is a fight it collects fees to sanction, and every regular, franchise, and interim designation multiplies the inventory. A federal rule cutting each organization to one champion per division does not trim their business, it eliminates most of it. The House bill was, for the sanctioning bodies, a revenue extinction event with a congressional vote already behind it.<\/p>\n It also moved toward the structure TKO\u2019s own testimony argued for, without arriving at it. Nick Khan told the Senate committee in April that boxing should have 18 champions across 18 weight classes. The House text did not deliver that number. Its rule ran per organization, which still leaves four world champions in every division, 72 across the sport, plus whatever a UBO crowns on top. But it was the only federal language ever written that moved in Khan\u2019s direction, and getting to his number would require going further than the House went, not pulling back. The Senate pulled back.<\/p>\n The Senate text<\/a> does not contain that section. Not a narrower version, not a phased-in version. It is simply not there.<\/p>\n The Senate bill also adds no new rules for the sanctioning bodies in its place. No ratings guidelines, no licensing, no disclosure beyond what the 2000 law already requires. The only title language in the Senate bill points the other direction: a UBO \u201cmay rely upon, utilize, or recognize titles and rankings\u201d from outside organizations.<\/p>\n That clause puts no obligation on the WBC, WBA, IBF, or WBO. It creates a path for a new UBO to work with the existing belts, since a UBO that wants its champion recognized as undisputed would need them. For the four organizations, the practical result of the Senate draft is that nothing changes, and a potential new line of business opens.<\/p>\n Here is the measure of how well they did. Compare what each faction got between the House version and the Senate version. TKO, the company that lobbied hardest for this bill, actually absorbed tighter rules in the rewrite: the Senate added a three year cap on first contracts, tripled the negotiation window from 30 to 90 days, restored a firewall between UBOs and managers, and moved doping penalties out of UBO hands, alongside contract limits that reach every promoter in the sport<\/a>. The sanctioning bodies got an entire section erased. The sanctioning bodies extracted a bigger change between drafts than the company with the Washington firm on retainer, and the only public account of how comes from Sulaim\u00e1n himself, below.<\/p>\n What makes the deletion notable is how much of the case against the current title structure was made, on the record, in the same room this bill came from. Cruz said at the April hearing<\/a> that multiple simultaneous champions make the sport harder to follow and harder to know who is truly the best, and the committee\u2019s own fact sheet lists competing rankings, multiple belts, and excessive interim titles as the first problem the legislation exists to solve.<\/p>\n The strongest testimony came from Khan, the WWE president and TKO board member helping lead Zuffa Boxing. He told the committee the sanctioning bodies\u2019 business model is \u201ccharging boxers money for the right to be called champions,\u201d that the WBC alone recognizes 163 champions across 18 weight classes, and that rankings have been manipulated, \u201carbitrary at best, but more often, downright crooked.\u201d He described the WBC stripping Terence Crawford of the undisputed super middleweight championship over a $300,000 sanctioning fee, and the IBF stripping Jai Opetaia after its president felt slighted at a press conference. Those are Khan\u2019s characterizations, and the WBC has disputed them in detail and on the record<\/a>. The full written testimony<\/a> is public.<\/p>\n That was April. The bill that arrived in July contains no provision on any of it, and the response from TKO tells you what mattered most. Dana White and Khan issued statements supporting the Senate version the morning it was introduced, title reform gone and all. TKO would say, correctly, that it does not write Senate legislation and does not control what a chairman puts in a draft. It also endorsed the result within hours of its appearance. Read the two facts together: the company argued for 18 champions in April and endorsed unlimited champions in July. The title cleanup was negotiable. The UBO structure, the piece that lets Zuffa run its own championships under federal blessing, was the prize.<\/p>\n And now the first reaction from the four organizations is in, and the arc of Mauricio Sulaim\u00e1n\u2019s own words tells the story. In April, as the bill moved, the WBC president said of Zuffa: \u201cThey\u2019re coming in so aggressively and so arrogant,\u201d he told Ring Champions. By May, with the fight at full heat, he told IFL TV, \u201cThey are the ones that came attacking like a mad dog,\u201d adding: \u201cWe have no issues. We\u2019re very happy. Look where we are.\u201d When Nick Khan aired his grievances about WBC fees and demands, Sulaim\u00e1n answered point by point, calling the portrayal \u201csuch a low class action.\u201d<\/p>\n