Indian boxing gets ready for prime-time punch

After its knockout performance in the Olympics, Indian boxing gets ready to step into a league of its own. The Indian Amateur Boxing Federation (IABF) plans to launch its own professional boxing league—based on cricket’s Indian Premier League franchise model—with team owners bidding for boxers around the country and prizes for both individual and team events up for grabs.

This league, likely to come up in a year, will be an off-shoot of the International Amateur Boxing Association’s (AIBA) planned professional league, called the ‘World League of Boxing’. While the international body’s key interest in launching a professional league is to try and cut down on the number of defections to similar leagues in the US and UK, in India a league of this kind could go a long way in generating public interest in the sport. Also, since India has no professional league, amateur boxers had no option but to hang their gloves if they couldn’t make it to international meets.

“The IABF will have complete control over the domestic league,” General Secretary Col. Murlidhar Raja told The Indian Express. The rules, he said, would be similar to those followed by US and UK leagues, where boxers contest without headgear and bouts last between 12 and 16 rounds. He also said these bouts would be scheduled for prime-time TV on Fridays and Saturdays and that ‘challenge bouts’, involving foreign guest boxers, were also being planned.

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But a few matters remain to be sorted out—like the status of these professional boxers in multi-discipline competitions like the Olympics and the Asian Games, where only amateur participation is allowed. “That remains our main concern,” said Raja.

All three Beijing heroes—Akhil Kumar, Vijender Singh and Jitender Kumar—have insisted they want to continue their amateur careers at least until London 2012, but the lure of professional boxing may prove hard to beat.