Championship Rounds (Round 5)

By Bernard Fernandez and Gerry Cooney

Renowned sportswriter and 2020 International Boxing Hall of Fame Inductee, Bernard Fernández releases his fifth book in the Championship Round series with a Foreword by former heavyweight contender Gerry Cooney.

"With this, his fifth anthology on the sport he loves, Bernard Fernandez proves he is a champion writer..." 

• Language: English
• Publisher: RKMA Publishing
• Release date: Apr 29, 2024
• ISBN: 9798869334978

Book preview

Praise for ‘Championship Rounds, Round 5’

With this, his fifth anthology on the sport he loves, Bernard Fernandez proves he is a champion writer. Working from one century into the next, the champ is everywhere all at once. He puts us with Muhammad Ali. There is a Russian, the Siberian Rocky. Call the roll: Frazier, Foreman, Liston, the furious Tyson and a Tyson Fury. Then put an ear to any page. I swear, you will hear Roy Jones Jr., boxing’s jazzman, making music with left hooks.

*Dave Kindred, a paragon of American sports journalism, was acclaimed for his work with the Louisville Courier-Journal, Washington Post, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the National Sports Daily. He is the recipient of the Red Smith Award for outstanding contributions to sports journalism and the Dick Schaap Award for outstanding journalism, and is an inductee into the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Hall of Fame

Many great fighters earn their reputation by throwing punches from different angles. In his fifth boxing anthology, International Boxing Hall of Fame writer Bernard Fernandez does the same, covering every angle of the sport through interviews with fighters, promoters, trainers, referees and others. Fernandez not only brings readers inside the ropes, but inside the entire byzantine world of the ring.

*Gordon Marino is the Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at St. Olaf College in Minnesota and a former coach for USA Boxing who wrote about the fight game for the Wall Street Journal

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Indisputably, Bernard Fernandez is among the very best boxing writers of his time. There’s a lot to be said for old-school journalism. Reading Bernie’s stories in his latest anthology served to remind me why I love boxing, and why I love good writing.

*Steve Farhood, longtime commentator for Showtime’s ShoBox: The Next Generation and former editor of The Ring

Informative, colorful, well-crafted and always entertaining – these are some of the words that best describe the fifth boxing anthology by the gifted Bernard Fernandez.

*John Whisler, semi-retired sports writer for the San Antonio Express-News widely recognized as the foremost media authority on boxing in the state of Texas 

In a sport where trust is often in short supply, Bernard Fernandez has covered boxing with honesty, clarity and, most of all, understanding and compassion for his subjects over 35-plus years. This fifth anthology of his best work is must reading for all who follow boxing, and appreciate good writing.

*Ted Lewis, retired sports writer for The Advocate/Times-Picayune

Bernard Fernandez, a five-term president of the Boxing Writers Association of America, acquired knowledge of all phases of the sport during four decades on the beat. For this, his fifth boxing anthology, that wealth of knowledge combined with his writing talent make for an enthralling trip down memory lane covering many of the fight game’s highlights and lowlights.

*Bill Caplan, veteran boxing publicist for a Who’s Who list of promoters over 60-plus years, is a 2022 inductee into the International Boxing Hall of Fame.

Championship Rounds

Round 5

Bernard Fernandez

Front cover art by Frank Ippoliti Jr.

Copyright © 2024 Bernard Fernandez

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the publisher.

RKMA—Drexel Hill, PA

ISBN: 979-8-218-42310-0

eBook ISBN: 979-8-8693-3497-8

Title: Championship Rounds: Round 5

Author: Bernard Fernandez

Digital distribution | 2024

Paperback | 2024

Published in the United States by Love-Love Publishing &

the New Book Authors Publishing Team

Dedication

No athletes in any other sport consistently give more of themselves than boxers, who in their quest to reach the uppermost tier of their demanding obsession often surrender bits of their health and well-being to the insatiable demands made of them in the ring. From the greatest of world champions to mostly anonymous four-round prelim fighters, all participants deserve respect for having accepted that challenge.

Contents

Championship Rounds

Dedication

Foreword

Section A

Section B

Section C

Section D

Section E

Acknowledgments

Foreword

by former heavyweight contender Gerry Cooney

Going back to my amateur boxing career in the early 1970s, I learned that a writer’s complimentary words could make a guy feel as good as having his hand raised in victory, while someone’s written criticisms could hurt far worse than any punch I was ever hit with.

During that early phase of my ring development, New York’s local newspapers were filled with stories written by some of the best boxing writers in the country. The Long Island Press had Marshall Reed, The New York Times had Michael Katz, Dave Anderson and Red Smith, the Daily News had Dick Young, Bill Verigan, Phil Pepe and Bill Gallo. I especially enjoyed reading Newsday’s Bob Waters.  He loved boxing and he loved me. How could I not love him back?

As I moved up to become a highly ranked heavyweight contender as a pro, I became familiar with the work of more boxing writers from around the country, guys like Jack Fiske (San Francisco Chronicle), Royce Feour (Las Vegas Review Journal), Dan Juipe (Las Vegas Sun), Jim Murray (Los Angeles Times), George Kimball (Boston Herald) and Jerry Izenberg (Newark Star-Ledger). Unfortunately, not having the Internet during that period made it difficult to read those guys on a regular basis. I relied on friends in the cities where they were employed to mail me newspaper clippings of their takes on boxing, especially when they wrote something about me. But the writers I most appreciated were those who did not have preconceived agendas when they sat down to write, but were, first and foremost, scrupulously fair in their coverage. No subject of a story could or should expect anything more than that.

One such writer was the Philadelphia Daily News’ Bernard Fernandez. A friend of mine in Philly, who did a lot of business in New York City, would always bring me the Philly papers whenever he came to town, and that’s how I was first introduced to Bernard’s always-excellent articles. So when Bernard asked me if I’d consider writing the foreword to this boxing anthology, his fifth and, as I understand it, his last, I didn’t have to think about it. I immediately said, I’d be honored to do it.

Championship Rounds, Round 5, as was the case with Fernandez’s first four anthologies, a compilation of his best material not only from the Philadelphia Daily News, but from TheSweetScience.com, The Ring magazine, CBSSportsLine.com and other media outlets, all of which are reflective of his unmistakable style. And because the book is an anthology, you can start anywhere. It so happened that when I first opened the book it was the start of Section B, The Heavyweights. I guess that was a sign I should start there, so I did. There were stories about such notable big men as Mike Tyson, Tyson Fury, George Foreman, Riddick Bowe, Sonny Liston and Lennox Lewis, as well as some on such rapid risers, and quick descenders, as Big John Tate.

In Section A, Tales Worth Telling, right after the terrific Sylvester Stallone Does Rocky Proud, which appeared in the PDN in 2011, was an article which really touched a nerve. Entitled Then and Now, Panama Lewis a Source of Controversy, it was published in Boxing 94 and it recalls the night of June 16, 1983, when Luis Resto won a 10-round decision against then-undefeated junior middleweight Billy Collins Jr., in front of a packed house in Madison Square Garden. The fight was the co-feature to Roberto Duran’s title-winning fight against Davey Moore.

Following the fight, it was found that the gloves of Resto had been tampered with prior to the bout, leading to Collins taking a fearsome beating. It was such a beating which caused irreparable eye damage to Collins and forced him to retire from the sport. Because of the forced retirement, a depressed Collins turned to alcohol and drugs. Ten months after the fight, he crashed his car into a creek and was killed.

The reason why this story touched a nerve with me is because my longtime partner on SiriusXM Radio, Randy Gordon, was the editor in chief of The Ring at that time. His editorial, on Collins’ tragic end, was called Murder, Plain and Simple. It led to charges of assault being brought against both Resto and Lewis, who were tried and convicted and served jail time. By the time they were released, Randy Gordon had become the head of the New York State Athletic Commission and when they applied to have their licenses reinstated, Randy turned them both down, ruling that they were banned for life. For Lewis, the ban extended until his death in 2022.

This story – one of many thought-provoking ones in CR, Round 5 –is representative, in my opinion, of what great boxing writing is all about. Fernandez gets into each story the way only Bernard Fernandez, an inductee into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in the Observer category, can tell a story.

Championship Rounds, Round 5 is the perfect book for any fight fan (the last section, Other Sports, includes some of his stories about basketball, baseball, football and other games people play) to take on a long flight, on vacation, or just to sit back and read in those moments when you want to relax. As for me, I’m taking my autographed copy and putting it prominently on display on my bookshelf, right next to Championship Rounds 1, 2, 3 and 4.

Gerry Cooney, now 67, compiled a 28-3 record as a pro, with 24 knockout victories, an outstanding career KO percentage of 85.7%. Naturally lefthanded, he fought out of an orthodox stance to make maximum use of his signature punch, a devastating left hook. In its list of the 100 Greatest Punchers of All Time, The Ring had the 6’6, 231-pound Cooney at No. 53, which some feel is not reflective of the higher place his incredible power merited. He is the longtime broadcast partner of Randy Gordon on SiriusXM Radio, and is a supporter of the Hands are not for Hitting" program, which tries to prevent domestic violence.

Section A

Tales Worth Telling

Pontificating With the Enemy

CBSSportsLine.com, March 16, 2006

ATLANTIC CITY, N.J.

The news release blared Sworn Enemies! and advised media members that mega-promoters Bob Arum and Don King, who have spent the better part of four decades engaged in boxing’s equivalent of the Cold War, would hold a once-in-a-lifetime joint forum Saturday afternoon at Bally’s Atlantic City.

Given the contentious history of the 74-year-old archrivals, many reporters, in town to cover the heavyweight fight that night between WBC champion Hasim Rahman and James Toney, showed up to see if there actually was a chance to witness the advancement of peace in our time. Personally, my mind was reeling with grainy, black-and-white images of Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta, of Khrushchev banging his shoe against his desk at the United Nations and shouting We will bury you! at glaring U.S. ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.

Perhaps the nice folks at Bally’s would even set up a stage designed to resemble the deck of a battleship, at which time King and Arum, dressed in military uniforms and with corncob pipes clenched in their teeth like General MacArthur, would sign a peace treaty formally ending boxing’s most enduring conflict.

Summit meetings used to be so epic, so consequential. Topics included the limitation of nuclear proliferation involving the superpowers, the disparate interpretation of human rights issues, the partition of Germany following World War II in Europe. Millions of lives, or at least the quality of those lives, hung in the balance.

What we got was Arum and King, now tenuously allied against new enemies, hawking an April 8 pay-per-view fight – Arum’s Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. King’s Zab Judah – which seemingly had been devalued by recent events. It was like being issued press credentials for the Paris peace conference and finding two used-car salesmen seated at the big table.

But, hey, that doesn’t mean the show wasn’t entertaining in its own right. HBO blow-by-blow announcer Jim Lampley – symbolically playing the role of Jimmy Carter at a Rose Garden meeting of Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat – moderated. Reporters got to ask questions which were answered mostly with half-truths and wild distortions, after which there were the obligatory photo ops. Arum (black) and King (burgundy) even wore complementary turtlenecks for the occasion, although His Hairness’ ensemble was accentuated with considerably more bling-bling.

The last time these two had come together for the presumed betterment of boxing, it was to co-promote the 1999 welterweight unification showdown of WBC champion Oscar De La Hoya, then promoted by Arum, and IBF titlist Felix Trinidad, the lead pony in King’s promotional stable. Trinidad won a disputed majority decision and King, during a self-indulgent monologue at the postfight news conference, had the power to his microphone turned off by an employee of Arum’s Top Rank, Inc.

Joke all you want about Arum and King, not their Oscars and Felixes, being the real Odd Couple. These guys are big enough, or at least smart enough, to allow bygones to be bygones – if there’s a profit to be made by joining forces.

If you were making a chart from zero to a hundred, Bob Arum – Harvard graduate, Kennedy raider, Jewish ethnic, got the complexion for the connection – would be most likely to succeed, King said, again outlining the obvious differences between himself and the man he once called a master of trickeration.

Don King – African-American, ex-convict, served time in jail – on (a scale of) zero to 100, it would 100 to zero for Bob Arum. But in reality, it hasn’t been that way because I’ve been extraordinary at what I do. Us playing off each other has been a blessing more than anything. At the end of the day, only the two of us are left standing. Collectively, the rest can’t tie our shoestrings.

The rest – Arum’s and King’s Nixonian enemies list – includes fighters-turned-promoters such as De La Hoya and Bernard Hopkins and, in a biting of the hands that so often have fed them, HBO Sports executives. As the rants-in-stereo continued, HBO publicist Ray Stallone angrily stalked off, incredulous that his company had, in essence, offered itself up as the pig-on-a-spit for an impromptu Friar’s Club Roast.

Asked to comment on HBO’s role in boxing, Arum said, the answer is, they’re paying me $4 million for the fight (Rahman-Toney) tonight. I’m not that much of an ingrate to diss them after they’re paying me. I’ll be happy to speak to you on Sunday morning, though.

That tongue-in-cheek pronouncement was greeted with the sort of heehaws I imagine were heard from the first audience that caught Abbott and Costello’s Who’s on First? routine.

As it turns out, Arum’s tirade against De La Hoya, who now heads his own company, Golden Boy Promotions, and De La Hoya’s presumed enablers at HBO, had only just begun.

Recently, unfortunately, what’s happening in boxing, fighters – encouraged by various entities involved in the sport – felt that they could be fighters as well as their own promoters, Arum said. Well, they can’t be, just as I can’t go in the ring and jab and throw left hooks and right crosses. Neither can a Swiss banker (that would be Golden Boy executive Richard Schaefer) who has no background in boxing and no background in meeting the public, call himself a promoter. But as long as the networks encourage that type of action, we’re going to have a rough patch in boxing.

Arum further noted that a bout featuring one of his most marketable commodities, Puerto Rico’s Miguel Cotto, that he had long ago reserved for the night of June 10 in Madison Square Garden – the eve of the Puerto Rican Day parade in New York – was now going against a pay-per-view card on the same date (Bernard Hopkins-Antonio Tarver, in Atlantic City).

That’s what you call cannibalization, chimed in King.

The accommodating Lampley, noting the location of some of the boss scribes, as King likes to call the national media, said, If anybody needs a glossary connecting the veiled references to the identity of the people to whom they were referring, Swiss bankers, fighters who become promoters, et cetera, see anybody in Row 2 or Row 4. They’ll connect the dots for you.

So what did it all mean, this silly summit that didn’t include the vow to dismantle even a single warhead? Just this: Arum and King are traditional promoters trying to protect their turf against what they perceive to be the infringement of revolutionaries within the industry, and if that means shaking hands, bear-hugging one another and faking smiles for the cameras, they’ll do it.

They also have no problem trying to sell ice to Eskimos, sand to Bedouins or Mayweather-Judah – at a suggested retail price of $44.95 – to consumers who foolishly might be deterred from increasing their April cable bill because Judah lost a unanimous decision to Argentine long shot Carlos Baldomir on Jan. 7.

All these people need, obviously, is a bit of enlightenment from Bob ’n’ Don. Judah’s shocking defeat, the dynamic duo claimed while maintaining reasonably straight faces, has placed his back against the wall and sent a subliminal message to the masses that he has to fight harder now, or else. Zab is now more of a threat to Pretty Boy Floyd because he took an embarrassing pratfall against some wild bull from the Pampas.

Right.

It’s the hottest ticket in Las Vegas, Arum said of the pairing of Mayweather (35-0, 24 KOs) and Judah (34-3, 25 KOs) at the Thomas & Mack Center. "(HBO Sports vice president) Kery Davis said to me the other night that this fight has caused more of a buzz in the African-American community than any fight with which he’s ever been associated.

I really believe, as we sit here now, that this fight will do better than De La Hoya-Trinidad.

King seconded that seemingly ludicrous notion with his familiar hyperbole. I agree with Bob. It’s going to do better than Trinidad-De La Hoya. This fight is going to be a super, extraordinary promotion. You should join in because it’s addictive. Don’t be standing on the shore when the ship is out to sea, yelling, ‘Bon voyage!’ We want you to be on board.

The hook for this fight, as envisioned by Arum and King anyway, is the merging of boxing and hip-hop culture. Mayweather is managed by James Prince, CEO of Houston-based Rap-a-Lot Records, whose client list includes Juvenile and Scarface. Judah hangs with Def Jam president Jay-Z.

(Full disclosure: Philadelphia Daily News features writer Damon C. Williams provided info on the rappers, as my musical preference tends to run more to Ray Charles, Marvin Gaye, the Beatles and Rolling Stones.)

Every rap artist is going to be there, King said. They are the bards of the ghetto.

Too bad Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur have passed on to the great beyond and can’t continue their hot-lead dispute as part of the undercard.

Hey … you don’t suppose something could be done with computer graphics to seemingly bring the dearly departed back to life? If they had just thought of it, Arum and King would have been up there pitching the idea harder than a Randy Johnson fastball.

Giving the people what they want, even if they don’t know yet that they want it, is what promoters do. And nobody does that better than these septugenarians with their undeniably shiny track records.

We’re getting on in years, Arum admitted, but I think we’re still very vigorous.

B-Hop’s Temporary Tat Temporarily Revolutionized Boxing Advertising

TheSweetScience.com, Dec. 14, 2016

When former middleweight and light heavyweight champion Bernard The Executioner Hopkins finally lowers the curtain on his 28-year professional boxing career with a farewell fight against Joe Smith Jr. on Saturday night in Inglewood, Calif., much will be said, and rightly so, by the HBO announcing team about his incredible longevity (he turns 52 on Jan. 15), his division-record 20 middleweight title defenses and his signature victories over Felix Trinidad, Oscar De La Hoya, Antonio Tarver and Kelly Pavlik.

Likely to go unmentioned is the mini-revolution he and associate Joe Lear helped spark on Sept. 29, 2001, when B-Hop took off his robe moments before the opening bell of his HBO Pay-Per-View middleweight unification showdown against Puerto Rican knockout artist Felix Trinidad in Madison Square Garden. The temporary tattoo on Hopkins’ back, pitching GoldenPalace.com, an online casino operating out of Costa Rica, instantly became a flashpoint of controversy that, at least for a few minutes, became nearly as much of a story as the masterful performance he would craft en route to stopping the favored Trinidad in the 12th round.

Perhaps surprisingly to Hopkins but maybe not, at least a smidgeon of the post-fight discussion involved that tattoo, which was sweated off by the third round. It might well have been that Hopkins, who has never been shy when it comes to self-promotion, knew exactly how much furor his unprecedented back adornment would cause within the boxing establishment. Then again, he might have agreed to wear it for a reason as simple as the $100,000 he was being paid over and above his purse of $2.7 million. The money was no small consideration to a fighter who, earlier in his middleweight title reign, had grudgingly accepted a couple of paydays for that relatively skimpy amount.

Asked about what his primary motivation was for accepting the deal offered by GoldenPalace.com, which was negotiated by Lear, Hopkins now says that cash and notoriety are commodities that always have gone hand-in-hand in professional sports. If some fighter was going to push the envelope, the brash and irrepressible B-Hop was just the guy to see how much he could get away with.

It did get a rise out of people, didn’t it? said Hopkins in recalling the incident that has become something of a footnote to his thick cache of career accomplishments. I guess (criticism) from some of the higher-ups in boxing was because they couldn’t get any money out of it. So they took steps to stop it, but a lot of people thought it was a pretty smart move on my part.

How smart was it? Hopkins, who has never been anything but supremely confident in his abilities, bet that $100,000 on himself at 2½-1 odds and walked away with $350,000.

I feel like the guy who invented the lightbulb, Hopkins said in May 2002, three months after he did the temporary tat thing again in a 10th-round TKO pf challenger Carl Daniels at the Sovereign Center in Reading, Pa., his first bout after the reputation-boosting conquest of Trinidad. "It was a big night, a big fight, but some people always are going to remember Bernard Hopkins wearing that tattoo on his back. I’m probably going to be the answer to a trivia question 10 or 15 years from now.

It was a gamble on my part. If I had lost badly to Trinidad, I probably would have been the biggest (idiot) in boxing. But I was betting on myself, and I’m not afraid to put my money where my mouth is.

Boxing’s major advertisers, of course, saw GoldenPalace.com as a threat and they hinted at legal action to prohibit other fighters from following Hopkins’ lead. But they didn’t have a leg to stand on, the matter falling under the province of First Amendment protection. That enabled the temporary tattoo era to continue on for another couple of years, until promoters – at the urging of casino-hotels involved in big-time boxing, which understandably didn’t want some online operation siphoning any of their business – began including restrictions in contracts that fighters either had to sign or else. They invariably signed because it was in their financial interests to do so.

We went to court about it, said Marc Ratner, then the executive director of the Nevada State Athletic Commission and now the vice president of regulatory affairs for mixed martial arts’ leading brand, Ultimate Fighting Championship. It was a First Amendment right for boxers to wear those temporary tattoos if they wanted to, but it was a relatively short-lived thing. The money they were getting from the tattoos was kind of an add-on to their purses, but they wouldn’t be getting fights (at casino venues) in any case if they did not agree to those specific clauses in their contracts.

Although Hopkins invariably is given the credit, or blame as the case might be, for launching the temporary tat era, it might not have happened without the involvement of Lear, whose job at the time was lining up endorsement deals for the not-yet-fully-celebrated middleweight champ. Lear had arranged for four such income-raising tie-ins, all of which involved Hopkins wearing advertisers’ logo patches on his trunks for his epochal clash with Trinidad.

But in the lead-up to fight night, Hopkins twice threw down the Puerto Rican flag at press conferences meant to hype the event. The companies with which Lear had made verbal arrangements suddenly decided they didn’t need or want Hopkins as their commercial representative.

I’d been working with Bernard since his first fight with Antwun Echols (in 1999), Lear said after the temporary tat spit hit the fan. "I got him his first (endorsement) deal before he fought Syd Vanderpool (on May 13, 2000). Later on, I’d get him something for $10,000 here, $20,000 there. Nothing really big, but it all added up.

"Before he fought Trinidad, I had deals with four companies for Bernard to wear patches on his trunks. Those deals cumulatively came out to a nice number. But when Bernard threw the flag down twice,those companies withdrew. They thought he was a crazy man, and it’s tough to sell crazy."

Not that Hopkins was trying to lose money; his plan for success was predicated on rattling Trinidad well before the fight. But while Hopkins succeeded in gaining a mental edge before he stepped into the ring, Lear needed something to compensate for the sponsorships that had dried up outside it. And, well, you know what they say about necessity being the mother of invention.

My job is to get endorsement deals for Bernard, and I was desperate, Lear continued. "Anyway, I was in Los Angeles for the Roy Jones fight (vs. Julio Gonzalez) and I saw a college football game on television. All the cheerleaders had, you know, those little temporary tattoos on their cheeks.

I remember thinking, ‘What if we get one of those tattoos, a bigger one, and put it on Bernard’s back?’ I recall someone having done something like that before, in England or Germany, so I can’t take credit for the concept. But I figured if people would pay to advertise on ring posts, which nobody really cares about seeing, they’d pay for an ad on the back of a fighter in the largest pay-per-view boxing event of the year.

Hopkins’ tattoo proved more temporary than the GoldenPalace.com folks might have preferred. Beads of sweat carried away the vegetable-dye lettering by the third round, but the impact created in the advertising world was no less significant than the boxing implications of Hopkins’ dramatic stoppage of the undefeated Trinidad.

In short order, temporary tats with more staying power, made with henna – a concoction that includes a henna plant and a dye known as p-phenylenediamine, or PPD – came into vogue, but not without additional controversy. The new and improved temporary tats were banned in the New Jersey communities of Wildwood and North Wildwood because people said the mixture left them with rashes and chemical burns on their skin. But its durability had the tattoos popping up on the backs and shoulder blades of fighters on nearly every television card, creating revenue streams for the athletes that even Lear found astounding.

I didn’t expect it to last longer than that week, Lear said of his brainstorm, which spread like wildfire after Hopkins had schooled Trinidad. I feel like the silent prince of boxing. Now, promoters give me the evil eye, but the fighters call me throughout the day and night, trying to get deals. I’m a friendly guy, but I’ve never been this popular. These fighters all want the extra money.

But the calls stopped when revised contracts, expressly forbidding temporary tats, became standard. Not surprisingly, the boxing industry adjusted to fill whichever income gaps that suddenly were unavailable to fighters and more traditional advertisers.

There is more money than ever pouring into sports, the revenue streams of just a decade or so ago having swollen to raging floods, wrote one media analyst specializing in the financial side of sports. "The NBA, which banned the appearance of ‘corporate insignia’ on players’ uniforms and bodies in 2002, except on shoes and league-supplied gear, became the first of the United States’ four major professional sports leagues to allow ads on jerseys, beginning in the 2017-18 season. The ad space will be sold as part of a three-year pilot program and take the form of a 2.5-inch square patch that is tailored to a sponsor’s logo and will appear on the left shoulder of players’ uniforms.

Jersey sponsorships provide deeper engagement with partners looking to build a unique association with our teams and the additional investment will help grow the game in exciting new ways, NBA commissioner Adam Silver said in announcing an experiment that is sure to become permanent if the projected goal of an additional $100 million in revenue to the league is reached, which seems a sure thing. We’re always thinking about innovative ways the NBA can remain competitive in a global marketplace.

The NBA pilot program could well signal a stampede by other U.S. sports leagues to further add to their bottom lines. In 2010, Sports Illustrated reported that 20 English Premier League soccer teams earned $155 million by selling ad space on their jerseys for a single season. A year later, New York-based Horizon Media estimated that America’s big four sports leagues were missing out on $370 million a year by not following suit.

Major League Soccer predated the NBA by selling ads – really large ones – on the front of teams’ jerseys in the spring of 2007, a practice that has continued. Similarly prominent ads have been standard issue on WNBA jerseys since 2011, and NASCAR is awash in ads, covering virtually every inch of the cars and drivers’ helmets and fire-retardant outfits. Stadium naming rights don’t come cheap (AT&T pays $19 million to have its name attached to the Dallas Cowboys’ home field) and identifying marks of sports-apparel companies (Nike, adidas, Reebok, Under Armour) appear on so many uniforms, from kiddie leagues to the big time, that they have become ubiquitous.

Boxing also is finding a way to profit from ad placements, if not to the same extent of the major team sports. For the highest-grossing prizefight of all time, the May 2, 2015, pairing of welterweight superstars Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao at Las Vegas’ MGM Grand, there was a pitched battle between Tecate and Corona to become the official beer of the event. Tecate, which has long been associated with Pacquiao, won out with a bid of $5.6 million to $5.2 million for Corona. The fight was contested with a large Tecate logo painted on the ring floor, and signage for the company was everywhere throughout the MGM Grand.

It was a big auction, Todd duBoef, president of Top Rank, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. We had to see who would come through with the biggest deal, and Tecate had Corona throw in the towel.  Added Scott Becher, chief integration officer at Zimmerman Advertisers: Tecate vs. Corona was the greatest boxing undercard of all time, and Tecate scored a knockout.

But hefty endorsement opportunities for fighters, even elite ones, remain relatively few and far between. Although ads can and do appear on trunks – one of the longest-lasting and more lucrative such partnerships involved Mexican legend Julio Cesar Chavez and Maseca, a Mexican flour manufacturing company that targeted Hispanic supermarkets in the U.S. as well as Central and South America – it is not the same as a LeBron James or Peyton Manning selling their images to the highest bidders. Besides, boxers don’t wear jerseys that can be affixed with