PROFESSIONAL boxing’s report card for the year 2023 is liberally covered in low marks for integrity, transparency, accountability, credibility and sustainability. Offsetting the low marks are high marks for greed, mendacity, and malevolence.

A story that appeared on the website of the Irish Sunday World newspaper on December 27 would in any other sport make news headlines everywhere, raising a veritable cri de coeur. But this is boxing — a sport, business and culture where anything goes.

The story revolves around an unredacted transcript of a California court hearing which took place in August this year. It took place as part of an ongoing legal battle against Irish mobster Daniel Kinahan over his now defunct management company MTK’s alleged attempt to illegally poach US fighter Jojo Diaz from boxing manager Moses Heredia.

According to the transcript, Heredia’s lawyers claim that MTK was a front company used to launder substantial sums of drug money through the bank accounts of the legion of fighters it supposedly represented when at its height as a major force in the sport.

None of said fighters paid as much as a penny of commission to MTK in return for services rendered, the hearing was told, and instead were regaled with hefty signing-on fees and other financial perks, making MTK’s the very epitome of a back-to-front business model.

In April 2022, in conjunction with the Irish authorities in Dublin, the US Drugs Enforcement Agency (DEA) went public in calling for Kinahan’s arrest for drug trafficking as head of the Kinahan Crime Group — an international drugs cartel alleged to have also been behind a raft of murders in recent years, and also implicated in gun running.

That almost every major figure in top flight boxing prior to April 2022 — fighters, managers, promoters, journalists et al — dealt with, vouched for, defended Kinahan’s involvement in the sport has to go down as a major indictment.

The sport’s lack of serious governance thrown up by its affair with Kinahan has also been reflected in the way the Saudi kleptocracy has been able to buy the acquiescence of the likes of Eddie Hearn and Frank Warren in the attempted sportwashing of what remains a human rights desert by Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman.

Having stuffed their mouths with Saudi gold, the latest instalment of this ongoing farrago took place in Riyadh on December 23.

Billed as a heavyweight extravaganza under the promotional blurb “Day of Reckoning,” it involved a clutch of top heavyweight talent being pitted against one another in an auditorium that was so lacking in atmosphere you could almost hear the screams from the depths of the country’s torture chambers just along the street.

Of the fighters involved, Anthony Joshua and Joseph Parker shone brightest with impressive victories over Otto Wallin and Deontay Wilder respectively.

Britain’s Daniel Du Bois also came through with a 12-round unanimous points victory over Jarrell “Big Baby” Miller.

The Saudis certainly know how to put on an event and have clearly identified top-flight boxing as the perfect vehicle by which to rebrand the kingdom as a major global sports and entertainments hub. The cost to the sport’s integrity is one its major movers and shakers have sadly decided is worth paying in the process.

Elsewhere in 2023, the mess that is YouTube boxing continued unabashed, impervious to any semblance of dignity. Jake Paul publicly calling out Saul “Canelo” Alvarez while seemingly sober and in full control of his faculties has to be counted as the nadir in this regard.

Meanwhile, UFC star and sometime boxer Conor McGregor’s love affair with controversy brooked no constraints. McGregor seemed to spend the entire year ringside at every major boxing event around the world, resplendent in tailored suit, designer watch, and spouting bombastic statements of intent to all and sundry.

The Irishman makes for good clickbait as he tirelessly promotes his own whiskey and Irish stout beer brands. He even took time out to have a go at asylum-seekers in Ireland, briefly talking himself up as the country’s next leader during an X (formerly Twitter) tirade which bordered on incitement.

Based on his anti-migrant rhetoric, his, evidently, would be a leadership style more akin to a latter-day Oswald Mosley than James Connolly. It will be interesting to see where, if anywhere, this leads to in 2024.

The rise of women’s boxing continued unabated in 2023, with Ireland’s Katie Taylor, Britain’s Savannah Marshall, and Chantelle Cameron over in the States proving that women are in the game for the long term.

Moving on to the amateurs, the news that the International Olympics Committee (IOC) voted to expel the International Boxing Association (IBA) from the Olympics movement due to issues surrounding judging, financial stability, and governance marked a new low point in the history of the sport.

That it was the first time the IOC has kicked out a participating governing body in its 129-year history tells its own story.

All this being said, boxing as a sport has never been more popular. New gyms are opening up all over the place, and it retains its appeal for many, all the way from the casual fan drawn to its entertainment element, to the purists for whom it remains both obsession and fascination.

Winding things up on a positive note, emerging as an Instagram and TikTok sensation of late has been a 76-year-old Scotsman by the name of Frank Gilfeather.

Gilfeather boxed for Scotland in tournaments across the world as far back as the early 1960s and his videos, under the title Frank’s Noble Art, have become a social media sensation.

Watching him impart his vast experience and knowledge with the eloquence of someone who’s in it for all the right reasons is an unalloyed treat.

At 76, he can still go some on the heavy bag too, and he does precisely that while teaching the fundamentals to his by now hundreds of thousands of followers around the world.

If only there were more like him, the world would be in a much better state.

Happy new year to everyone, thanks for supporting the column, and good health to you and yours in 2024.