Events & Discoveries

Nice Try, Counselor

The round and resonant voice of Counselor Kenneth Royall, onetime Secretary of the Army, boomed out in the marble-pillared hearing room of the Supreme Court of the United States. As defense counsel for the International Boxing Club he was contending, with a mountain goat's sense of footing, that the Supreme Court ought to reverse a lower-court ruling which called the IBC a monopoly, and at the same time he was contending that if the Supreme Court did not reverse the ruling it ought, perhaps as a friendly gesture to monopolies everywhere, to allow the IBC to go on doing business much as before.

He did not put it quite that way, naturally, but that was the way it sounded to the lay ear.

In the lower court, after finding that the IBC was indeed a monopoly in violation of the antitrust laws, Federal Judge Sylvester J. Ryan had ordered that the International Boxing Clubs of New York and Illinois (they are one and the same IBC) be dissolved. He ordered that their owner, James D. Norris, president of Madison Square Garden, get out of the Garden, which owns IBC of New York. He ordered that the Garden and the Chicago Stadium, owner of IBC in Illinois, be available at reasonable rental to other promoters.

One effect of his orders would be to end the IBC's control of all home TV fights.

But Royall's idea of a good solution, if it were found that the law had been violated, would be:

1) To prohibit the IBC from having exclusive contracts with boxers.

2) To prohibit the IBC from exclusive contracts with arenas except the Garden and the Stadium.

3) To limit the Garden and the Stadium to two or three championship bouts each a year.

Except for the third item, these proposals would leave the situation pretty much as it is. The IBC has no real need for exclusive contracts with boxers. As the sole TV promoter it can control them without contracts, simply by depriving them of work if they act ornery, giving them work if they genuflect. It can perpetuate rule of the championships by seeing to it that only properly brain washed managers get TV fights for their stables. It can build up fighters it favors, ignore those who do not accept its rule.