Knockout bonus could cost Taylor his career

AMERICA AT LARGE:The first bout of the so-called 'Super Six' tournament showed the novel knockout bonus to be antithetical to the very concept of boxing, writes GEORGE KIMBALL

“Boxing continually has to defend itself against allegations, including some from the medical community, that it is a sport whose objective is to inflict grievous and sometimes permanent damage on one’s opponent. There are good and compelling arguments to the contrary, but all of them are seriously undermined by an exercise officially affirming that participants in the tournament will be rewarded for producing a concussion.”

There was no attempt to cast myself as Nostradamus when I wrote the above (for the October issue of Boxing Digest, now on the newsstands.)

In pointing out a potentially troublesome flaw in the so-called “Super Six” tournament which got under way with bouts in Berlin and Nottingham last weekend, the intent, rather, had been to pose the philosophical argument that boxing is supposed to be above this sort of thing – and that the so-called “knockout bonus” is, or ought to be, antithetical to the very concept of the sport.

I had no way of knowing the issue would manifest itself in the very first bout of the tournament. But I did know it was a bad idea.

When US-based Showtime, in collaboration with its cable television counterparts in Germany and Britain, announced the Super Six back in July, everyone seemed to have been so giddy over the prospect of what were supposed to be the world’s six best super-middleweights hooking up in a round-robin fight-fest over the next two years that nobody bothered to examine the fine print.

Following the New York announcement, world champions Mikkel Kessler and Carl Froch, along with their supporting cast of Arthur Abraham, Jermain Taylor, Andre Ward and Andre Dirrell, were dispatched on a grand tour of Europe to further drum up business for the multi-million-dollar event.

Each of the six participants was guaranteed at least three bouts against the others in the opening round, with the top four then proceeding to an elimination stage that won’t conclude until 2011.

You’d have needed a microscope to find it, but the ground rules specified that qualification for the second stage would be determined by a points system in which losers of a bout received zero points, the winners two – with an additional bonus point awarded for a knockout.

Several years ago an enterprising Boston radio host had attempted to run a similar event, albeit on a much smaller scale. In revealing plans for his “New England championships”, Eddie Andelman proposed to spice up interest by offering cash bonuses to any boxer who knocked out his opponent during the proceedings.

“If you’re going to pay $500 for a knockout, why not make it a thousand if he puts the guy in the hospital, and $2,000 if he kills him?” I asked when I informed Andelman that his scheme was almost certainly illegal and unlikely to be approved by any reputable boxing commission.

In that instance it never got that far. I didn’t even know Eddie had lined up the Boston Herald as a major sponsor of his tournament, but when my publisher got wind of my objections he relayed his concern to Andelman and the knockout bonus was quietly withdrawn.

In preparing the Boxing Digest story, I’d spoken with three former state boxing commissioners. Marc Ratner (Nevada), Ron Scott Stevens (New York) and Dr Wilbert McClure (Massachusetts) were all troubled by this aspect of the super-middleweight tournament, but since the “reward” came in the form of points rather than money, Ratner and Stevens wondered whether they would have been legally empowered to disallow it.

McClure was less equivocal: “I’d just say ‘no’,” he said.

And since advancing to the second round guarantees a boxer at least a few million dollars more in purses, it seems disingenuous at best to claim there is no financial stake attached to the Super Six version of the knockout bonus.

Saturday night’s curtain-raiser in Berlin matched Abraham, the undefeated, Germany-based Armenian who had resigned his middleweight championship to participate in these more lucrative proceedings, against Taylor, who since losing his middleweight title to Kelly Pavlik two years ago had lost two of his three outings at super-middle.

Although the bout was competitive in its early stages, Abraham had drawn well clear by the latter rounds.

Aided by a one-point deduction when Taylor was penalised for an ostensible low blow in the sixth, the hometowner held an insurmountable lead (four points on the scorecards of two judges, two on the other’s) after 11 completed rounds.

In a fight he literally could not have lost anyway, Abraham proceeded to pick up his bonus point by knocking Taylor out with six seconds left in the bout.

The American sustained a concussion and was transported by ambulance to a local hospital, where it was determined he was suffering from short-term memory loss (often a pre-indicator of frontal-lobe brain damage), and he was held overnight.

Following a brain scan on Sunday morning, Taylor was released, but with cautionary orders not to fly for at least a week. He and his wife, Erica, are travelling around Europe this week, probably unaware the Super Six people are already trying to figure out how to replace him in the tournament.

Abraham was joined in the winner’s circle on Saturday night by England’s Carl Froch, who gained two points for his split-decision win over Dirrell. (Though they went 0-2 on opening night, the Americans get to play a home game next month when Ward faces Denmark’s Kessler, the pre-tournament favourite, in California.)

The three points he picked up for the win plus the knockout make Abraham a near-lock to advance to the next round, but at what cost? Jermain Taylor’s career almost certainly ended last Saturday night. It was the third time in two years he had been KO’d, but the authors of the other two (Pavlik and Froch) were trailing decisively and needed a knockout to win.

Abraham, who had the win in his pocket, obviously had another motive, and admitted having deliberately gone for a result that, in the absence of the insidious knockout bonus, would have been utterly superfluous.