New York Boxing Tsar Aiming to Rejuvenate City Fight Scene

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The New York Sun

For the head of a state agency, Ron Scott Stevens carries unorthodox credentials. Then again, his position as boxing tsar for New York is anything but orthodox.


Stevens, who was raised on the Lower East Side with the surname Rabinowitz, has a resume that includes driving taxi cabs and teaching water skiing, and he can recite monologues word-for-word from any of the four plays he’s written and produced in offbeat theaters.


He can also tell you about his more recent career as a promoter and matchmaker for prizefights. Stevens earned a prized reputation for luring up-and-comers to sacrifice unblemished records in the name of a good donnybrook.


“I made wars with no money,” Stevens said about his matchmaking days. “That’s like surfing with no waves.”


Now Stevens, 57, has become the state’s most visible boxing enthusiast. After recently completing his first year as chairman of the New York State Athletic Commission – the longest period of time any public official has held the $101,600 post in years – he has begun to cement his reputation as a hands-on reformer attempting to revive New York’s dwindling fight scene.


Consider the numbers. In the six months of transition before Stevens took over as chairman in June of 2003, the scandal-prone commission claimed to have regulated only two boxing cards. Since Stevens’s appointment, the state has regulated 34 boxing cards, from small-time bouts held in Bronx roller-skating rinks to the first boxing matches held in Madison Square Garden after a hiatus of more than two years.


This drastic increase is not Stevens’s direct responsibility. Then again, it’s not entirely by accident that it has come about under his watch.


One reason, promoters say, is that Stevens has made the commission more “user-friendly” in dealing with the labyrinth of contractual and medical paperwork they must file, not to mention nixing some of the commission’s more onerous regulations and introducing others.


“Ron understands the problems of boxing on both sides of the fence,” said Bobby Goodman, the chief matchmaker for Don King, who is promoting Saturday’s matchup at the Garden between a reinvented Felix “Tito” Trinidad and Nicaraguan brawler Ricardo Mayorga.


King has been no stranger to the Garden in recent months. This April he put on a card that headlined heavyweight Andrew Golota against Chris Byrd, and has a potential November 13 date for another Garden card to headline David Ruiz and Golota. Seven additional cards are also planned in New York till the end of the year.


“My attitude is that I want to see promoters and fighters succeed in New York,” Stevens said. “It’s important for the promoters to see profits and it’s equally important for local fighters to build fan bases here in their home town.


“So long as everything is done accordingly with our regulations,” he added, “we want to put New York back on the boxing map.”


There once was a dusty time in New York when one could see a boxing match most nights of the week, either in neighborhood fight clubs or in any of the four incarnations of Madison Square Garden. But that golden era began to fade with the advent of televised shows. As casinos in Las Vegas and Atlantic City raised site fees and began offering fighters and their entourage complimentary accommodations, boxing in New York became virtually extinct.


The commission, which was established to regulate prizefighting when it became legal in New York during the 1920s, has carried the reputation of a semi-vacant public body plagued by perennial mishaps and staffed by political hacks. A report conducted last year by the office of the state’s inspector general found that many of the commission’s former top officials were essentially no-show employees and performed “minimal, if any work.” Oversight, they concluded in turn, suffered.


“Those days are long gone,” said Stevens, a registered Democrat who succeeded the former police commissioner Bernard Kerik as chairman. The current police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, served in the post for nine months before Kerik.


Unlike his predecessors, Stevens is not a lawman, but his presence at commission headquarters at 123 William Street in Lower Manhattan has been felt.


“The biggest difference, and probably the most important one, is that Ron answers the phone,” said Tim Lueckenhoff, chairman of the Missouri Boxing Commission and head of the American Boxing Commission, a consortium of the nation’s boxing commissioners. “When we called before,” Lueckenhoff said, “that phone would just ring and ring and ring.”


Stevens also likes to make his own telephone calls: to promoters, managers, trainers, fighters, and cutmen. He picks up calls on his cell phone when he goes to the movies. He is, by his own admission, “a talker.”


“The man has moxie,” said Jerome Becker, the agency’s deputy commissioner and Chairman of the State Housing Finance Agency. Preparing for a recent fight upstate, Becker said he went looking for Stevens and couldn’t find him. Becker searched the locker rooms, the bathrooms, all around the venue. The chairman was missing. Then he looked in the ring. He found Stevens pushing a broom over the canvas, sweeping up dust and cigarette butts.


“Ron has the ability to see the sport from every vantage point,” said Lou DiBella, a city-based promoter holding the latest installment of a bi-monthly “Broadway Boxing” series tonight at the Manhattan Centre in midtown. “He’s the kind of guy New York has needed for a long time. He doesn’t alienate the boxing community.”


Where fighters were once required to have MRI tests conducted every year to check for brain injuries, for instance, Stevens now requires the costly tests to be conducted once every two years. Stevens has also created checklists for fighters that break down their contracts line-by-line, so they know what they’re getting paid, and what they’re paying for. He has also hosted the first-ever coordinating seminars between the agency’s referees, judges, doctors, and staff to review rules and debate such minute issues as whether a referee should carry small scissors to snip fraying tape off a fighter’s glove.


This incessant attention to detail, unnoticed by spectators, many agency employees said, distinguish Stevens from his predecessors.


Journeyman and truck driver Michael Rothberger relayed the story of how he got to fight at a nightclub last year. After the death of his mother, Rothberger had lost more than 30 pounds and worked himself into fighting shape, then convinced the chairman to pull him off the state’s suspension list (he was there for poor performance) and allow him one last shot at a win.


But in the pre-fight frenzy, Rothberger (0-5) had forgotten to bring his athletic supporter. The fighter pleaded with others in the makeshift locker room to lend him a supporter, but all refused. With minutes to go before the fight, Stevens went into the locker room himself, approached another fighter, demanded his supporter and – away from view – gave it to Rothberger.


Rothberger was beaten soundly, but the point is that without personal intervention from the chairman, he wouldn’t have had a chance at all.


Many fighters are skeptical of meddlesome state officials that put on boxing matches but don’t necessarily know how to read the crude and complex wallpaper that lines the insular boxing industry.


“This guy ain’t so bad,” said Rothberger. “He’s different.”


The New York Sun

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