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Boxing league to unify titles planned

Borrowing a page from other professional sports, Pensacola lawyer Fred Levin wants to create a boxing league with corporate sponsorship.

Levin, who represents five-time World champion Roy Jones jr. and other boxers, hopes the World Boxing League can replace the hodge-podge of sanctioning organisations already out there - WBC, WBA, WBO, WBU, IBF, ICO, and so on. The proliferation has resulted in multiple champions and fan confusion.

''We'd like to go back to the old days, when everybody knew who the champion was, and the respect boxing had,'' Levin told the Pensacola News Journal for a story on Monday. ''It was the great sport.''

January 2000 is the tentative start date for the WBL. Levin created the WBL concept with Terdema Ussery, president and chief executive officer of the W.S. NBA's Dallas Mavericks. Ussery is a former Continental Basketball Association commissioner and former president of Nike Sports Management, where he got to knew Levin and Jones.

They have sought help from artist and boxing fan Leroy Neiman as well as former FBI investigator Warren Flagg.

Murad Muhammad, Jones' promoter and a Levin client, said he welcomed the new league but was sceptical about its chances.

"To come into the world with a new sanctioning group like the IBC and the like, all alphabets, no one knows them,'' Muhammad said. "So how could you come on the level of the IBF, WBC and WBA? These guys have been here.''

He said the only thing Levin has going for him is that a wealthy sponsor might be able to sustain the league over the long haul.

"If they keep it going ten years, it will be a factor,'' Muhammad said.

Levin raised the possibility of such a league during testimony in March 1998 before a senate committee that was investigating professional boxing.

"I basically said private-sector sponsorship, rather than legislation, is really the answer,'' Levin said.

A corporate sponsor would give the sport legitimacy through a recognisable, credible brand name, similar to the Winston Cup in U.S. stock-car racing, he said.

''It's not just the WBL,'' Levin said. "It's the WBL Pepsi World Championship, for example.''

Corporate sponsorship and sale of stock would allow the league to operate without charging sanctioning fees that typically take three per cent from each fighter's purse.

Levin also envisions a reduction to about ten weight classes with the emphasis on title fights that would appeal to television matchmakers who often are forced to show mandatory mismatches under the existing structure.

He hopes boxers would be ranked by something like the media polls used in college football. Sanctioning bodies produce their own rankings that are susceptible to influence from promoters and often fail to recognise another group's champion as a contender.

Levin is one of the United States' most successful plaintiff lawyers. He engineered Florida's suit against the tobacco industry that resulted in a $13 billion dollar settlement. He contributed ten million dollars from his tobacco fees to the University of Florida Law School, which then was named after him.

Agencies