BSA gives the sport a shiner

Before FW de Klerk became a Nobel Peace Prize winner, he was your run-of-the-mill apartheid thug.

As the minister of education in 1988, he threatened to cut university subsidies because of student protests on campus.

At Rhodes we retaliated with the biggest demonstration I had witnessed in my years there. The cops were our largest audience, and, thankfully, they behaved themselves.

De Klerk was also responsible for professional boxing - a responsibility that was regularly shifted to different departments before falling under the auspices of the education department in 1987.

De Klerk's department wanted to deregulate professional boxing and - without consulting the commission - it devised a plan to scrap provincial commissions and limit the national body's function to merely issuing licences to boxers and ensuring the competence of ring officials.

Promoters would have been free to do what they liked, and anyone with any common sense would have known that that was a lousy idea.

The boxing board, chaired by Judge HWO Klopper, challenged De Klerk head on.

In a hard-hitting letter to the minister, Klopper explained that the Boxing Act had been promulgated in 1954 to protect boxers from unscrupulous promoters, who felt nothing about reneging on promised purses or not ensuring fighters' safety in the ring.

The board was so outraged it threatened "to resign en masse", the Sunday Times reported at the time. De Klerk, though said to be furious, scrapped the bizarre plan.

Even in those dark days, the commission was independent from the government. It made and paid its own money, and it made its own decisions.

Costs were manageable, partly because there were just four employees - Stan Christodoulou, two secretaries and a messenger.

When I last checked, the incumbent Boxing SA had around a dozen staff, and was heavily reliant on government handouts.

Professional boxing in this country is in a mess, and one major problem is SABC's blackout of the sport for the past few years.

To recap briefly, Boxing SA tried to usurp TV rights from promoters a couple of years back, presumably to get more funding (broadcasting rights for boxing have historically belonged to promoters, both here and abroad).

Wanting to protect hisinterests, promoter Branco Milenkovic took Boxing SA, the SABC and Sport Minister Fikile Mbalula to court.

The national broadcaster refused to air any fisticuffs until the matter was settled.

This past January, SABC got Milenkovic and Boxing SA into a meeting where they agreed to settle their differences, and then announced it would soon start televising boxing again.

But a month later the promoter's lawyers were reportedly still waiting to secure a meeting with their Boxing SA counterparts. Boxing SA was reluctant, it was alleged.

Milenkovic wanted guarantees before giving up his fight, and because he never got them, he didn't drop the case.

So the legal battle continues and the blackout carries on.

Last week, Mbalula publicly grilled Milenkovic for the sorry status quo.

There is clearly a close relationship between Boxing SA and the government and, unsurprisingly, they are pushing the same agenda.

We have yet to learn the details of this agenda, and who dreamed it up - was it the government or Boxing SA?

Such confusion could not exist if there was a healthy separation between the two.

We can only hope Boxing SA's new board, recently announced by Mbalula, will strive for independence.