BSA reduces Springs bill to a beltless affair
● And then there were none. This afternoon’s tournament at KwaThema in Springs, which initially started out with two national title fights, has been reduced to a beltless affair by Boxing SA (BSA).
Just five days ago the regulator stripped the headline middleweight contest of its national title status; champion Walter Dlamini and Fernando Rodrigues will fight over 10 rounds instead. Two reasons were given.
First, Dlamini is supposed to make a mandatory defence, which means he must face a higher-ranked contender than Rodrigues, the No 6 contender.
Second, Rodrigues wasn’t eligible to challenge because he had been stopped in his last outing — by Dlamini in July.
It sounds reasonable, but there are questions. Why did BSA not alert promoter Sandile Xaka to this issue earlier?
In fact, BSA had seemed happy with the fight at first, even sending Xaka a letter dated February 19 stating “the application was duly considered by the sanctioning committee and has been sanctioned”.
By that stage BSA had already refused to sanction the other proposed SA title fight between lightweight champion Thompson Mokwana and Michael Mokoena, who are also fighting over 10 rounds today.
Mokoena was disqualified as a challenger because of the controversial three-fight rule where contenders must have three consecutive bouts in the division before challenging.
Yet this regulation has allegedly been applied inconsistently with insiders counting no fewer than eight breaches last year.
BSA applied its mind timeously to Mokwana-Mokoena, so why not to Dlamini-Rodrigues?
Both fight contracts were submitted to BSA in January, said Xaka.
BSA sanctioning committee chairman Khulile Radu said the fight came to his attention about two weeks ago. He added Dlamini, as a hand-picked challenger, had inherited the mandatory defence from the champion he dethroned, Wade Groth. Dlamini’s trainer, Lionel Hunter, said they had not been told about a mandatory fight.
Rival promoter Andre Thysse said he pointed out the problems with Rodrigues’s challenge a few weeks ago.
Boxing in SA is governed by an act of parliament as well as regulations, both of which are on BSA’s website, and neither contain the rules that exclude Rodrigues as a contender.
Thysse said those two rules were issued by BSA as memorandums in 2011.
These invisible rules are not on BSA’s website — why not? They should be because the visible regulations actually suggest Rodrigues is a legitimate contender.
Today’s tournament had been billed as a collaboration between SuperSport and Xaka “to put the spotlight back on SA championship boxing”.
The spotlight’s there, just no SA titles.