If sports were restaurants, boxing would be the rustic, old steakhouse that hasn’t changed so much as a side dish since prohibition. Why are rounds three minutes long? Why championship belts instead of hats? Because it’s always been that way. Boxing is a wonderful sport. At its best, it’s sublime. But at its worst, it’s trite, tedious and borderline pointless. As fans, we pay a hundred bucks for fights that happen in the middle of the night and that loyalty is more often than not rewarded with terrible scoring, missed calls and uncompetitive contests. Let’s make some changes. We can save boxing. You and me, buddy. You ready? (Please note: I have zero confidence any of these will ever happen.)

1) No more sanctioning bodies

This is the most obvious and important change to make. For anything else in this sport to evolve, first we have to abolish the alphabet groups and establish a formal commission. With the eradication of all sanctioning bodies we wave goodbye to criminally suspect rankings boards, egregious sanctioning fees, the proliferation of titles and having multiple champions in the same weight class. Instead we would introduce an international commission that governs the entire sport based on reason and merit. With a structure in place to ensure proper rankings – something like the Transnational Boxing Rankings Board with one champion per division – the sky is the limit.

2) Overtime rounds

Picture this: two boxers go at each other for 12 rounds, each scoring a few knockdowns as the momentum sways from one man to the other across the fight. The judges tally up the scores, hand them to the ring announcer and, after letting the tension in the arena reach a nearly unbearable crescendo, he reveals a unanimous draw across all three cards. Everyone goes home aggressively unsatisfied.

Now picture this: the scorecards are read, a draw is announced and the ring clears out as both fighters return to their corners to put their mouthpieces back in for one more winner-takes-all round. Both guys are exhausted, bloody and starting to swell, but they are putting it all back on the line for 90 seconds to determine who will be rewarded for the 12 gruelling rounds that preceded it and the 10 weeks of agonising training before that. Is anyone in that arena sitting down when the bell for the 13th round rings?

3) Same-day weigh-ins

Of all the ideas on this list, this one has the best chance of being implemented. There is an obvious purpose to having weigh-ins the day before fights: after killing themselves for the previous month to make weight, fighters need to replenish before going into the ring. However, given the extent to which modern fighters rehydrate in the ensuing 24 hours, the door is wide open for size discrepancies to have disastrous consequences.

The most common example is Arturo Gatti’s two-round destruction of Joey Gamache back in 2000 that ended Gamache’s career and left him with permanent brain damage. That’s an extreme example but Gatti only outweighed Gamache by 15 pounds and we often see gaps wider than that these days. The solution seems simple: fighters weigh in on the morning of the contest with enough time to properly rehydrate but not gorge themselves into a new weight class.

4) Zero-sum purses

Mismatches are a massive waste of time but how do you stop fighters from accepting a pay cheque even if the outcome is almost predetermined? Winner-takes-all purses. Here’s how it works now: say your fighter is the champion of his division and you want him to take an easy fight or a tune up. Fine, but if he chooses to fight someone outside of the top 10, he has to put his entire purse on the line. Same goes for the challenger. How many champions are willing to risk their title and their purse just to take an easy fight? It’s the ultimate “put your money where your mouth is” scenario.

5) Start fights earlier

There is no excuse for entering the ring on a Saturday and leaving it on a Sunday. The TV stations will complain because they premiere new movies at 7pm on Saturdays but Transformers: Revenge of the Mechanical Fart Moth will just have to wait until later – like we do now.

6) Five judges

Most competitive dance-based sports use a five-judge system where the two widest scorecards are dropped and the middle three are used as official scores. Boxing should follow this model to safeguard against incompetence and corruption. It would add another layer of insulation against stupidity and misconduct, and boxing needs as many of those as it can get.

7) Allow refs to cuts the tape

The tape on a fighter’s glove comes loose and thrashes around like an angry tapeworm for half a round until the ref finally calls time and walks him over to his corner. The corner then fumbles around at half speed while giving their man a long list of instructions. It’s unfair and a waste of time. Just give the ref a roll of tape and little pair of scissors.

8) No testing for recreational drugs

Overturning a decision because a fighter tested positive for recreational – that is non-performance enhancing – drugs is archaic and shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how drugs work. Boxing is a hard sport. If a fighter wants to take the edge off by smoking marijuana or doing a couple lines a few weeks before a fight, who cares?

9) No training while suspended

This would be hard to enforce but, nevertheless, if a fighter is suspended for taking performance-enhancing drugs, he should not be allowed to train. If boxing is serious about cleaning up its act, the punishments dished out should reflect that. Most elite boxers take six months off between fights anyway, so a suspension isn’t a huge deal. If any banned fighter caught in a gym had their suspension extended by a year, they would think twice before wolfing down another Mexican clenbuterol burger.

10) Video replays for cuts and fouls

Boxing is a fast, nuanced sport and referees have a thankless job. If referees miss a call in the blink of an eye, they can be blamed for ruining a fight. We should implement a system that protects the referees against forgivable mistakes and rewards the fighters with accurate calls. Let’s use video replays to determine the cause of cuts and the accuracy of slips and foul calls.

If a cut is ruled to be from a headbutt and there is an angle that clearly shows it to be from a punch, the replay can be shown to the ref between rounds and he can amend his call. Same goes for knockdowns that are ruled slips and vice versa, as well as knockdowns that are caused by low blows. Boxers deserve to have calls that affect the outcome of fights properly ruled. No referee wants their judgment questioned, but I’m sure they all have calls they would like to have back. Video replay would help everyone.

• This article first appeared on The Queensberry Rules

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