(I will say this one time: Do not, do not, do not, DO NOT (OK, four times) turn this into a political discussion. Do not do it. I will seriously review your worth to me if you do, and consider you for total and complete banning. I'm not trying to be an a-hole here, but if you want to talk politics on a blog, Google that and keep us out of it.)
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a lifelong boxing fan who has tried and failed in the past to fight for what he feels would be the sport's best interests, is again pushing for boxing to be nationally regulated in the United States.
While I think it's an all well and good sort of idea, in practice you probably don't wind up doing much other than ruining the sport. I suppose some may argue it's long since been ruined, but I'm not one of the doom-callers that think the sports world is ending when my childhood memories simply become memories, so that's best left for others to discuss.
I'd love for McCain or anyone else to help get the sport "cleaned up. Problem is, I don't think it's as dirty as the uninformed, "boxing is dead and fixed" dorks believe it to be thanks to a hundred sixteenth-hand conspiracy theories they read on the internet.
Should there be MUCH tighter medical standards and practices? Yes, there absolutely should be. No one in this country should have been allowed the gall to let Tommy Morrison step foot in a boxing ring again as a competitor. States like West Virginia and Texas, which spring to mind immediately, have given licenses to fighters that in a sane world don't belong owning them. Nevada generally does a good job, and so does New York, the state that originally put the ban on Evander Holyfield, until Texas later re-licensed "The Real Deal."
That's one thing that should certainly be looked into. But if the idea is to spend a lot of time hemming and hawing about how boxing operates, then this will go the way of any blog post or internet article myself or anyone like me could write, which is the exact same destination of a fart in the wind.
I also still can't get over McCain's stance on mixed martial arts, which once was something I sort of agreed with as far as rules and regulations and all that go (and the sport, in a roundabout way, owes McCain a debt of gratitude), and now is the stance I most hate hearing:
"I didn't like it when I saw a film of a guy who had somebody down on the ground and was head-butting him while he was unconscious. But they cleaned it up. If that's what people want to see, I'm not complaining about it. I just complained about what it was originally. I just don't think it is a pure sport. It's not what boxing can be."
In Bob Costas Speak (which is all that is), he means, "It wasn't around when I was a kid."