It is often said that “history is written not only by those who act, but by those who fail to object.” In the case of boxing in 2026, congressional inaction and institutional quiet may be dismantling the Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act. 

 

Obituaries are rarely written at the moment of death.
 They are written in advance — quietly, cautiously — when the signs of impending doom are already there:  the weakening pulse, the ignored warnings, the silence of those who should have spoken first. Institutions do not usually collapse because they are attacked. They collapse when, at the moment the structure begins to shift, those who depend on it assume it will hold — that someone else will reinforce the walls, that relevance is permanent, that time remains. But then the dam breaks. What follows is not chaos, but order — a new order — shaped not by those who had the most at stake, but by those who showed up when the rules were rewritten. When Congress acts, when regulators nod, when courts later defer, the outcome often appears inevitable in hindsight. But inevitability is usually nothing more than silence preserved in law.

 

This is an account of such a moment in boxing. Not a scandal.
Not a personality clash.
But the slow, deliberate dismantling of a regulatory framework — not through repeal, but through redefinition — while those charged with defending it remain conspicuously absent.

 

Legendary boxing journalist Thomas Hauser, who has been enshrined in the International Boxing Hall of Fame, published a crucial piece in the Guardian. In his investigation, Hauser exposed the contractual mechanics behind Zuffa Boxing’s proposed model — the long-term control provisions, the imbalance of leverage, and the erosion of fighter autonomy that echo the very abuses that led Congress to pass the Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act in 2000. This article does not repeat that reporting. It builds on it.

 

Where Hauser examined what fighters are being asked to sign, this investigation examines why those contracts are now possible: the legislative strategy, regulatory acquiescence, institutional silence, and historical pattern that together determine how entire industries are reshaped.

 

The Ali Act, Fed to the Paper Shredder

 

If Congress believes what Zuffa is selling is good for boxing, it may not yet understand what it is considering dismantling. The Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act was not symbolic. It was structural — designed to fracture power, separate roles, mandate transparency, and prevent promoters from becoming managers, regulators, and judges of their own markets. What is now being proposed by Zuffa and considered by Congess does not repeal the Ali Act outright. It does something far more effective: it empties it from within. Through exemptions, redefinitions, and “compliance” language, the law survives in name while its protections are shredded. History has seen this maneuver before. Keep the statute. Remove the teeth. What emerges is not reform, but consolidation — the steady drift toward monopoly that Congress once sought to prevent.

 

Unified Boxing Organizations and the Return of Vertical Control

 

The creation of Zuffa as a “Unified Boxing Organization” invites a return to vertical integration: promoter, manager, ranking authority, and title operator collapsed into a single corporate structure. Supporters promise efficiency and stability. History promises something else: opacity, coercive leverage, and reduced competition. Fighters do not negotiate in markets like this — they submit to them.

 

What Is Missing: Long-Term Care and Pensions

 

Despite rhetoric around safety and minimum pay, the proposed framework remains silent on long-term medical care, chronic neurological treatment, and post-career pensions. Event-based protections do not address lifetime damage. Centralized control without lifetime responsibility does not modernize boxing — it externalizes its costs.

 

California, Regulatory Blessing, and the Quiet Pivot

 

California’s unanimous endorsement by executive officer Andy Foster of the proposed legislation sent a powerful signal to Congress: reform is welcome; scrutiny is unnecessary. That signal accelerated momentum. Elsewhere, commissions and regulators remained quiet. Oversight institutions did not resist. They watched.

 

The Silence of Boxing’s Power Brokers

 

With the exception of  WBC president, Mauricio Sulaiman, who wrote a vague but open letter to the world boxing community, the WBA, WBC, IBF, and WBO have taken no formal position before Congress.
 Top Rank, PBC, Golden Boy Promotions, and Salita Promotions have not testified. Golden Boy’s criticism of Zuffa exists — but only in streaming media. Podcasts and interviews do not create legislative history. Courts do not cite YouTube. No one asked for a seat at the congressional table — the only place where silence carries permanent consequence. Zuffa's Dana White warned that boxing’s institutions may become extinct and it was not hyperbole. It was historical awareness.

 

When Others Spoke — and Shaped Survival

 

History draws a bright line between those who spoke and those who disappeared. The railroads failed to unite publicly as consolidation overtook them; they were absorbed, sidelined, and erased.
 Newspapers assumed indispensability as platforms extracted their lifeblood; communities lost accountability and civic memory. By contrast, baseball's Curt Flood advocated for athlete's rights of self-determination and lost — but he changed sports forever. Name, Image and Licensing rights ("NIL") reform succeeded in college sports because athletes and states made silence impossible. Speaking did not guarantee victory.
 It guaranteed relevance.

 

Congressional Blessing and Judicial Deference

 

Legislative silence does not remain silent. It becomes doctrine. Courts defer to what Congress heard — and to what it did not. If consolidation is blessed now, it will be extraordinarily difficult to challenge later.

 

If this course continues, the outcome will not be debated. It will be studied. Historians may examine the crater left behind — like a meteorite impact — and trace it back to a moment when Congress believed it was encouraging reform, while in fact shredding the Ali Act’s core protections. They will note the warnings.
They will note the silence.
They will ask what might have been preserved had stakeholders united before impact. The sand in the hourglass is nearly gone.

 

The Sound of Silence

 

There is a reason this moment feels familiar. In 1964, Simon & Garfunkel released The Sound of Silence — a quiet song lamenting a society that was full of noise yet incapable of listening. People talking without speaking. Hearing without listening. Turning instead toward a glowing “neon god” that replaced substance with spectacle. It was not about the absence of sound.
 It was about the absence of voice. That metaphor fits this moment in boxing with unsettling precision. There has been no shortage of commentary — interviews, streams, social posts. But commentary is not testimony. Noise is not participation. The warnings exist, but they are not being entered into the record.

 

There was once a Senator who understood this distinction. John McCain loved boxing. He boxed at the Naval Academy, attended fights, and understood the sport as a human endeavor marked by risk and sacrifice. When he saw fighters exploited by conflicts of interest and opaque power, he did not remain silent. He co-sponsored the Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act and fought to pass it into law, insisting on transparency, separation of roles, and federal oversight. When those protections proved incomplete, he continued pressing for stronger national standards.

McCain understood something now at risk of being forgotten: reform begins with objection. What is unfolding today would have been instantly recognizable to him. A law designed to protect fighters is being hollowed out under the language of modernization. Consolidation is being framed as progress. And the institutions best positioned to object have chosen quiet adaptation instead.

 

This is how silence becomes policy.

 

And history will record not that boxing’s institutions were overpowered — but that they ignored their fate while there was still time to change it. When the obituary is finally read, it will not sound like tragedy. It will sound like inevitability — not because collapse was unavoidable, but because silence was chosen. And in the end, the most haunting sound may not be outrage or collapse — but the sound of silence.