Boxing: Sulaiman's about-turn over Brodie title fight decision does not add up

The battered old sport of professional boxing took another hook to the head last weekend when the outcome of a contest in Manchester between Michael Brodie and Injin Chi for the vacant World Boxing Council featherweight championship became subject to belated intervention by the body's long-serving president, Jose Sulaiman, who claims absolute authority over all he surveys.

For anyone who missed an exciting tussle on Sky television and did not catch up with scant newspaper coverage, Chi, from South Korea, was awarded a majority decision only for it to be amended by Sulaiman following heartfelt complaints from Brodie's associates, including the promoter Barry Hearn. Those complaints involved the deduction of a point from Brodie by the Belgian referee, Daniel van de Wiele, in the opening round for ducking dangerously low, at worst a clumsy manoeuvre that left him with the added disadvantage of a head gash that bled profusely throughout the fight.

Since Van de Wiele did not adopt the customary procedure of clearly indicating that Brodie had been punished, and later conceded that the butt was not intentional, what followed from Sulaiman's action was confusing. As reported by my colleague Steve Bunce on these pages, Sulaiman proudly blamed himself, saying: "I added up the scores wrong and when I realised my mistake, I changed the decision." He did this by taking two points from a score submitted by one of the judges, declaring the contest a draw.

One question to be asked, and I ask it seriously, is why did Sulaiman act as he did when responsibility for checking the master scorecard actually rested with the WBC's appointed superviser, Reuben Martinez, of the European Boxing Union, who speaks no English and was not present when the protests were lodged? Another is why did Sulaiman hand the championship belt to Chi at Manchester airport?

When Lord Brooks of Tremorfa recently withdrew as the British Boxing Board's representative to the WBC (although still affiliated, the Board is no longer connected to any of the main sanctioning bodies) it was on the grounds of the difficulty in obtaining a copy of its rules and Sulaiman's insistence that the office of president carries with it the entitlement of autonomy. In other words, that he can make up things as he goes along, something he has frequently done, most controversially in 1990 when, under pressure from the promoter Don King, he suspended James Douglas' knockout of Mike Tyson until fierce media criticism quickly forced him to back down.

This week, at the launch of Frank Maloney's lively autobiography No Baloney: From Peckham To Las Vegas, I spoke to a number of people who attended the fight in Manchester and others who watched it on television. The majority view, which tallied with my own, was that Chi was a close but clear winner regardless of the deduction from Brodie's score.

Controversial decisions have always been with us (many felt that Oscar de la Hoya was exceedingly hard done by when recently dropping a decision to Shayne Moseley for the WBC and International Boxing Federation middleweight titles in Las Vegas, all three judges arriving at a two-point margin in Moseley's favour) and there is at present a debate over whether the British tradition of leaving decisions to the referee should be dropped in favour of the internationally applied system.

Brooks, the chairman of the British Board, is vehemently opposed to the latter. "It's argued that judges on three sides of the ring are more likely to arrive at a just verdict but down the years there has been plenty of evidence to prove that this isn't necessarily the case," he said when we spoke earlier this week.

It can be argued that the conclusion arrived at by the referee, John Keane, when he made David Barnes a narrow winner over Jimmy Vincent for the British welterweight title last July was controversial enough to raise fresh doubts about appointing the referee as sole arbiter, but it carries none of the baggage associated with sanctioning bodies.

So much gossip, so much speculation, so many low fears have been stirred by the activities of those organisations that people are bound to lap up the juices of their imaginations. The answer, of course, is an overall boxing authority - but some would think that a shocking proposal.