"Why I fixed fights"

I fixed a lot of fights over the years. In two I didn't fix but should have, people paid heavily for my carelessness. Even though I set up Mitch "Blood" Green and Leon Spinks cushion-soft in their comeback fights, I managed to get one embarrassed and the other nearly killed. There had been opportunities for them, deals that came undone when they lost. It wasn't as if the winners benefited in any tangible way either. At best their victories brought them smallish short-term bragging rights. Among boxing insiders they were objects of scorn for having won, as incompetent at their jobs as Green, Spinks, and I were at ours.

Winning a world title is definitely hard, time-consuming work, so that kind of arc expresses some truth. What it obscures is the fact that most of the fights designed to get that fighter his title shot are fixed in one way or another. Anybody who spends his own money advancing a fighter and knows what he's doing engages in some form of fight fixing. And, wittingly or not, almost every titleholder has benefited from fixes.

Fight fixing is such an accepted part of the boxing business that there's a standard way to do it. You call up or visit the gym of any trainer who represents "opponents," and have the following exchange:

"I've got a middleweight who could use a little work." [Read: His fight shouldn't be more than a brisk sparring session.]

"I got a good kid. But he ain't been in the gym much lately." [He's out of shape.]

"That's OK. I'm not looking for my guy to go too long." [It's got to be a knockout win.]

"My kid can give him maybe three good rounds."

And that's it. Your fighter's next bout will go into the record books as a third-round knockout victory.

All in all, it isn't surprising that boxers operate under a different system from the people who make money off of them or who watch and write about them. In the real world, boxers and their managers pre-arranging the outcome of fights, working collusively against a hostile system, makes sense. Fixing fights, even at the expense of the public, isn't just good business. It's a survival strategy for the disenfranchised class in boxing: the fighters themselves.