DAVID ISAACSON | SA boxing desperately needs to bridge the great divide

In some ways the newly appointed Boxing South Africa (BSA) board seems to be on a hiding to nothing, but hopefully that won’t stop them from trying.

Their potential looming failure is not because of the intrinsic qualities each member might or might not bring, but because the sport of professional boxing is in a perilous state.

And I’m not just talking about the shenanigans of the outgoing executive, which contravened the terms of the Boxing Act and the sport’s regulations, which are gazetted.

The regulator is a statutory body and is supposed to uphold the laws stringently and fairly for everyone.

It shouldn’t take new chair Sifiso Shongwe and his board too long to get BSA acting in sync with the legislation.

Mind you, BSA is supposed to maintain a detailed punishment index for each professional boxer, though they haven’t kept their fight records for years now. Getting that right will take time and effort.

Hopefully they will be able to escape the problem of irregular expenditure that has haunted the body for years.

Getting such things right will not all be equally easy, but it will be them simply doing their jobs.

On the one hand, that’ll be refreshing considering where we’ve come from, but that might be the least of their problems.

There are far bigger mountains to climb if they’re going to try to reclaim the glory days that sport minister Zizi Kodwa, who appointed them, placed on his wish list.

Broadcast rights are owned by the promoters who have to stump up the cash to put on shows. BSA is there to regulate the fights rather than administer the sport

To begin with, the regulator will start out with an R11m hole in its budget, thanks to the failed long-winded legal efforts to overturn a CCMA ruling in favour of fired CEO Moffat Qithi.

That’s a huge chunk of change when one considers that BSA’s total income for the year ending March 31, 2023 was a little more than R28m, of which nearly R20m came from government.

Kodwa made it clear the fiscus couldn’t afford to bail them out, suggesting they look to business for help.

But the thing about professional boxing is that BSA doesn’t own broadcast rights as regular sports bodies do. Broadcast rights are owned by the promoters who have to stump up the cash to put on shows. BSA is there to regulate the fights rather than administer the sport.

They earn some money by charging promoters sanctioning fees for each tournament staged.

Just more than a decade ago BSA, when Qithi was in office, tried to argue that it owned TV rights and wanted to take them. Nothing came of that. I don’t see how they would have had a case had that gone to court.

That’s not to say that BSA can’t attract sponsorships. When the regulator was first launched in the early 2000s, Vodacom came on board, though the cell operator skedaddled at its first opportunity, which coincided with Dali Mpofu’s tenure as chair.

The regulator’s predecessor, the national boxing board of control, enjoyed a long relationship with Old Buck, who manufactured the national title belts.

Perhaps there’s room for BSA to look at streaming and broadcast rights for development shows which are not televised, and this could be used to attract sponsors.

It would be great if they could find a backer to provide finance to bring a few top trainers and officials out to the country for workshops with local coaches and boxers as well as judges and referees.

Then there is the issue of the small number of professional fighters in the country. 

And there is almost nothing BSA can do to build these, short of licensing weekend pub-fighters and bouncers.

The pool of fighters ultimately depends on the health of amateur boxing, that is run by a different body which hit a shocking low in 2020 by failing to send a team to the African Olympic qualifying tournament.

An administrative shake-up since then failed to help South Africans to qualify for Paris 2024 at the continental tournament earlier this year.

BSA can dance jigs and hold daily 12-hour prayer sessions, but they have no direct control over this.

They could engage their amateur counterparts in a bid aimed at, for example, staging pro-am tournaments and perhaps getting professional trainers to advise amateur coaches and conduct training clinic with amateur fighters.

The divide between amateur and professional boxing is deeply entrenched in South Africa and this needs to change drastically, as it has around the world.

Another job BSA faces is hiring a full-time CEO. Qithi was fired after it emerged that he had a criminal record, which the Boxing Act forbids (don’t ask me how BSA lost that case at the CCMA).

Hiring a new CEO who doesn’t have a criminal record would be a good start.

The board members should be able to do their job properly without having to perform miracles, but the loftier their goals, the greater the room for failure.

But hopefully they’ll try anyway — I like to think that boxing is worth it.