May 16, 2003

Eddie Mustafa Muhammad knows a union of professional prize fighters is long overdue but who knew how long overdue? The former light heavyweight champion knows.

"This should have been up and running since the first fight - the one between Cain and Abel,'' the co-founder of JAB, the Joint Association of Boxers, said this week after the fledgling union announced it had become affiliated with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

Muhammad and JAB co-founder Walter Kane have been kicking the idea of a fighters' union around for some time but only in the last few weeks did it really seem to take root after they claim to ahve approached Teamsters' president James P. Hoffa, Jr. about affiliating with the most powerful union in America. Whetehr they asked Hoffa or Hoffa came to them, in the end the Teamsters agreed. For fighters, that affiliation is a small first step on what is sure to be a rocky road but it is at least a movement in the right direction for a sport whose practitioners have long suffered indignities, injuries and ignorance with few voices to advocate for them.

"Every other sport is organized,'' Hoffa said at a public rally in Las Vegas this week. "Now boxers will be organized. Boxers need health insurance. Boxers need pensions. Boxers need to get a fair share of the proceeds of their labors.''

Most of all, boxers need to get some respect and they need to get a break, which is something Muhammad says he believes JAB can provide them after long being the most exploited workers in American sports. "I'm tired of hearing about fighters sad plight,'' Muhammad said from Las Vegas. "I want that game to be over. A fighter goes out and works hard and takes great risks and when it doesn't work out at the end of the day he comes home with nothing.

"No pension. No benefits. No money. I want this to become a union fighters can be proud of. I want the sport to be something that when a guy says he's a fighter he can stick his chest out. Most of us can't be world champions but we can get what we need out of being a professional fighter. This union is something we need to break out of the stereotype of the broke fighter. This is long overdue. I'm ecstatic.''

Muhammad said he has already signed up about 100 fighters and says he has representatives both in the United States and overseas ready to begin an organizing effort that will bring to prize fighting what baseball players, football players, basketball players and hockey players have long had - an arm of representation to deal with the promoters who run the sport and to combat the many ills of the most disorganized organized sport in modern history.

But Muhammad has been around too long to believe such an effort will be easy. Once a world champion who suffered through managerial and promotional woes like many fighters before him and now a trainer of fighters both world class and novice, Muhammad brings a well schooled and even more well jaundiced eye to this effort.

What he also brings is something just as important - an almost spiritual belief in the union movement and the power of the Teamsters, a union that has suffered many indignities itself, more than a few of them self-inflicted. It is the seemingly messianic quality of Muhammad's faith that makes one wonder if maybe this time, so many centuries since Cain first hit Abel, things can be different for the vast majority of prize fighters who labor in the vineyards earning small pay and gaining little reocgnition or anything that can last for their efforts.

"You see guys like Meldrick Taylor (who suffers from pugilistica dementia yet totters on into any ring some unscrupulous promoter will put him in) and Iran Barkley (a warrior once so brave he beat Thomas Hearns but who is so down on his luck he is back living where he grew up, in the New York projects) and it's sad,'' Muhammad said. "These kind of stories have to stop. It will take time but things will ahppen.

"Mustafa means chosen. I believe I've been chosen to do this. People have told me the powers in boxing won't go along with this. They've told me there'll be death threats. I welcome a death threat. Come on with it! I'm not saying I'm a tough guy but I'll say the things that are real. Anyone who opposes us isn't for the fighter.''

One guy who apparently is for the fighter and may be for the union is promoter Cedric Kushner, who has become the first from his side of boxing's mean streets to begin meeting with Hoffa and JAB officials. It is through such discussions that JAB hopes to land a contract that will establish minimum payscales and fair benefits. It is the same kind of approach once taken by the humblest of men, Cesar Chavez, as he and his farm workers association struck for and negotiated contracts with individual growers in California.

It took boycotts and some violence for Chavez to succeed in getting migrant workers a liveable work place and Muhammad knows there will be many fights between this week's public announcement and any meaningful organizing efforts on the behalf of boxers. In fact, already some in the sport have begun to question his motives and whether it was he who got the Teamsters involved or if he was hired by them to be their front man instead.

Alex Ramos, who heads up the Retired Boxers Foundation, penned an open letter to Hoffa outlining the concerns of his organization, which raises money to help retired fighters down on their luck. He claimed Muhammad was the fourth person to be offered a spot as a union activist for boxers by the Teamsters and wondered if it was really the Teamsters who created JAB rather than Muhammad?

While those may be legitimate concerns from someone who well knows the many times fighters have been manipulated and manuvered without their knowledge down through the years, it begs the larger question. Does it really matter whether Muhammad formed JAB or the Teamsters came up with the idea and hired Muhammad as its first organizer?

Every union movement begins with such organizers, who work at the grassroots level to attract membership. Most unions eventually affiliate with a larger national organization to increase their power. How this came about for prize fighters is significant because honesty has always been a key element lacking in the business of boxing but what is more important is that boxers finally get a voice powerful enough to be heard. That may or may not ultimately prove to be JAB but the need for such an advocacy group is obvious and needs to be supported by those who love boxing and boxers.

As Ramos pointed out in his letter, "Finally, even though I wish you the best, I still think that the professional boxers will get what they want when they are ready to accept the fact that the changes they want are really up to them...the fact remains that boxing reform must come from the fighters - not Teddy Atlas, Sen. John McCain or the Teamsters.'' Ramos' point is well taken. As he wrote further on, "...for every fighter who joins, there will be a hundred waiting for them to pass on a fight because of union demands.''

That is often what the union struggle is about. It is often as much about educating its own potential members as it is about defeating hard-hearted businessmen. But for true unionism to come into boxing a first step must be taken. This week it was by the organization Eddie Mustafa Muhammad now heads.

How far it goes and how successful it becomes depends on two things - the integrity of the organizers of JAB and the resolve of the workers themselves - the fighters - to get what they both say they want and they deserve. If they sell each other out at every turn JAB will be easily parried by promoters from coast to coast. But if they use the JAB effectively it could become what it is in a fight - a key to victory.

Ramos and others have asked where the big names in boxing that Muhammad claimed to have on his side were this week when the rally in Las Vegas occurred. He asked where was Oscar De La Hoya or Bernard Hopkins or Lennox Lewis or Evander Holyfield. Those superstars of the sport are necessary to be sure but they do not need a union and so may be the last to truly support it.

It is the rank and file that need a union to negotiate a minimum contract with promoters like Kushner and it will not be easy to do. It will be what their industry is all about. It will be a fight, but it's a fight worth signing up for.



This article originally appeared on HBO.com on May 16, 2003 written by Boxing Columnist Ron Borges.
 

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