Miami Football and Boxing: A Look at the Future of the WBC

Throughout the week we have all had to hear about the Miami scandal.  How these young players took gifts and trips from a booster who was a convicted felon.

Most people are outraged that this happened, but I'm not.

You push these 18-22 year old men into the spotlight and tell them they're special, tell them that they are entitled to money, women and being worshipped because they are physically dominant, and they'll believe you.

This is the natural progression of things when you give free rein to these athletes and look the other way, and make no mistakes about it, people did look the other way.

The coaches must have known at the very least.  I'm sure some of the players between 2002-2010 had big mouths and most have told enough people for higher-ups to hear.  Yet nothing was done.

Why?

Because anyone who might have been in a position of power didn't want to harm their special athletes who they had spent so much time building up.  They had a chance to cut out the malignant cancer that started spreading through them and they didn't.  Now they just might lose their team altogether.

I bring this up because the WBC is headed down the same path.  I won't lie and say I have ever cared for the multiple organizations that have filled boxing.  In fact, I detest them and their multiple champions in excess weight class.  However, this all boils down to entitlement and what is going to happen in the very near future for the Mexico based belt brand.

Jose Sulaiman is 80 years old.  He will be dead within the next few years.  While some boxing fans might rejoice at this I don't.

That is because his son Mauricio Sulaiman is being groomed to takeover and that is when the nightmare will begin.

Jose is by no means a great man, but he has earned his spot no matter how much he has abused it.  He was 37 years old when he joined the WBC.  He was 43 years old when he became president.  He had to earn the power he was given.  Instead of making his son do the same he has given him a position and groomed him to take over. 

This means that Mauricio has never had to fight for anything and, just like the Miami football players, he has let it affect him.

Back in 2007 Kelly Pavlik won the middleweight championship.  Almost immediately afterward it was revealed that Mauricio had come to his dressing room after the fight and asked for his trunks, which Pavlik begrudgingly gave up.  They were given back, but it wasn't until Thomas Hauser wrote an article later in the year that it showed that Sulaiman had pushed his weight around to get them.  Hauser wrote that Sulaiman had hinted that he could make it harder on Pavlik if he didn't comply.

Luckily, federal law makes it illegal to give gifts like this. “No officer or employee of a sanctioning organization may receive any compensation, gift, or benefit, directly or indirectly, from a boxer [other than a sanctioning fee].”  This makes it so Mauricio Sulaiman and the WBC can never have any of these so-called "gifts".

He should have already known that though and I believe he did.  However Hauser also wrote that it wasn't the first time Mauricio had done this, but that he hoped it would be the last.

Fast-forward to 2011.  Bernard Hopkins made history by beating Jean Pascal in Pascal's own hometown.  This time it was Dan Rafael who reported that Sulaiman came into Hopkins dressing room and asked for his trunks.  Hopkins wasn't as unestablished as Pavlik was when he won the belts so he wasn't intimidated and turned Sulaiman away.

Four years later and Mauricio is still doing the same things.  The only difference was that he wasn't violating federal law this time because the fight took place in Canada.  Nowhere on the CBF website does it make any mention of punishment of sanction organizations if they try to obtain "gifts".

I'm not sure if he knew this or if he just didn't care.  My guess is that he didn't.

The fact that Mauricio was willing to go into boxer's locker rooms and demand such things shows what a power complex he has.  It comes from being given everything and denied nothing just like the Miami football players.

Everyone is talking this week about how Miami might have to "kill" it's football team all because they let the excess of their players go unpunished.  The same might happen to the WBC and wouldn't that be a gift to all of us.