The general consensus among boxing enthusiasts is that this weekend’s fight between Juan Manuel Marquez and Manny Pacquiao at the Mandalay Bay Events Center will be an electrifying event. For the most part because there’s a good chance someone’s going to get knocked out.
For this reason, a rule change enacted by the Nevada State Athletic Commission in September 2006 that requires junior welterweight and welterweight boxers, when fighting in Nevada, to wear 10-ounce gloves, as opposed to the 8-ounce gloves they used to wear, has stirred controversy.
While this does not impact Marquez and Pacquiao, junior lightweights (130 pounds) who will use 8-ounce gloves Saturday night, it does affect boxing’s hottest division right now, the welterweights (147 pounds).
Bob Arum, the head of Las Vegas’ Top Rank, Inc., says that the new rule is costing Nevada big fights—and thus, big money. His top welterweights, Antonio Margarito and Miguel Cotto, superstars in the sport and very heavy punchers, refuse to fight in Las Vegas with the new rule change, Arum says. They claim it decreases their punching power.
Arum has called for the commission to re-examine the issue. Keith Kizer, executive director of the NSAC, says that will happen during either the commission’s April or May meeting.
Margaret Goodman, a local neurosurgeon and longtime ringside doctor who heads the commission’s medical board, says, “The problem with the rule change is that it was made arbitrarily, without any scientific or statistical documentation.”
Kizer says that research is now being conducted, and will be presented when the issue is up for re-examination. However, he points out, the most important data known so far is that between 1975 and 2005, there were eight fatalities in boxing, and all but one occurred in the 135-to-147-pound weight classes.
The rule change came during a wave of new regulations ignited by the death of lightweight boxer Leavander Johnson in 2005, the state’s second boxing-related fatality that year. The new rules came as no surprise, as the NSAC has a reputation as a pioneer organization whose chief responsibility is fighter safety, even at the cost of profits.
Richie Sandoval, a former bantamweight champion whose career ended when a knockout loss left him in the hospital in critical condition, and who now oversees the Top Rank boxing gym here in Las Vegas, says a difference of two ounces in glove size can be very significant, because in the competitive realm of professional sports, the smallest details separate champions from no-namers.
Yet Sandoval does not hear grumblings among fighters about the rule change. Kizer echoes that. “No boxers have personally told me they have a problem with the gloves,” he says.
In the end, however, it all comes down to economics, says Sandoval. “If you offer a fighter enough money to come to Vegas, he won’t care what size glove you put on him.”