CINDERELLA SPORTS Show them the money
It’s worrying that SA’s longest-serving and most successful boxing promoter, Rodney Berman, is spending more and more time overseas.
Two years ago he won an exclusive contract to promote in Monaco. At the time he insisted he would use mostly European fighters. Yet last year he regularly fielded some of his top local prize fighters there — Hekkie Budler fought twice and Ryno Liebenberg once. Johnny Muller also had a bout, having come in as a substitute for Tommy Oosthuizen.
The irony is that Berman, who has taken out a promoting licence in England as well, has the most profitable promotion in SA thanks to his contracts with pay channel SuperSport and the Emperors Palace casino.
The fact that he’s spreading his tentacles abroad explains his lack of confidence in the sport locally, run by Boxing SA (BSA).
Boxing in SA is in trouble, yet it was once the second-biggest sport in the country.
When Gerrie Coetzee took on John Tate for the WBA heavyweight crown left vacant after Muhammad Ali retired for the first time, more than 80 000 fans filed into Loftus Versfeld to watch. The only live broadcast that Saturday night, on October 20 1979, was on radio, and at our home in Cape Town relatives joined us to listen to the bout. Rodney Berman Lack of confidence in the way SA boxing is run
Many old-timers who were in Johannesburg at the time will tell you there used to be three tournaments every weekend — Friday nights and Saturday afternoons and nights. Fast-forward 35 years and there were just 20 professional tournaments in Gauteng in the whole of 2014. It is said to be the lowest number in living memory.
A major contributing factor is the SABC blackout of the sport on its TV channels (which doesn’t affect Berman because of his tie-up with SuperSport).
The national broadcaster has carried little boxing since 2010, the year of the World Cup. First it overspent its budget on the soccer, but in 2012 came the threat of legal action by promoter Branco Milenkovic, who has been the single most active promoter on SABC for the past several years.
He took issue when then BSA chairman Ngconde Balfour claimed that the regulator and not promoters owned TV rights.
At the time BSA was heavily dependent on a huge government grant to survive — a far cry from the days when the national commission was entirely self-sufficient, funding itself from tournament-sanctioning fees and licence fees.
While most sports federations own broadcast rights, boxing has been an exception historically, not just in SA but overseas
like swimming, athletics and rowing are also cash-strapped, yet they are producing Olympic medallists and world beaters.
They own their TV rights, and