Muhammad Ali Revival Act sails through the US House
Rest easy chumps, the sport has been saved!
The U.S. House of Representatives passed the Ari Emanuel Muhammad Ali American Boxing Revival Act Tuesday in a 2/3 voice vote. Now the damn thing proceeds to the U.S. Senate and then, presuming passage, from there on to the desk of POTUS Trump for his signature.
Read the final legislative text here, unlike a majority of the House members.
The process itself was ably summarized on X.com by BoxingInsider:
The House votes tonight on the first update to federal boxing law in 26 years. 40 minutes of debate. No amendments. No public hearings with active fighters, state commissions, matchmakers, or ringside physicians. Why is this bill being fast-tracked without hearing from the people it regulates?
I received a similar question from a reader the other day who said, “I genuinely, for the life of me, do not understand why there's no interest from any politicians regarding combat sports reform. I get the basic reasons, but they do not make any sense to me.”
My response to him read as follows:
Unfortunately our legislative system is 100% pay to play. TKO has lobbied members from both parties and our entire congress (both House & Senate) are completely made up of people who spend ALL of their time begging rich people for money and doing what they're told by “donors”.
If there was a massive organized effort by fans to counter-lobby, possibly TKO's buy out could be countered but boxers and boxing fans have not been active in opposing it -- largely because the incumbent boxing promoters are hopelessly out of their league trying to counter TKO.
As for MMA fans, TKO has systematically cultivated the most reactionary fan base on Earth and actively worked to alienate everyone else so no help will come from that quarter.
All fight fans need to know is that only one Representative raised his voice in opposition: Democrat Rep. Joe Courtney of Connecticut. One.
There are House bills on Santa Claus and 9-11 Memorials that draw more opposition than The Ari Emanuel Act. The House voted on this bill like it was renaming a random post office. That’s how little they think of fighters and fans.
It feels like we’ve been covering this Ali Revival Act atrocity forever, but it hasn’t even been a year.
The incumbent powers in boxing managed zero opposition to the bill, presumably they aspire to be UBOs themselves.
Meanwhile, with a few exceptions, what public opposition and press coverage there was of the Ari Act came from the dissident MMA community.
But for the most part, boxing fans and insiders paid the Ali Act no mind and are set to learn what happened to their sport as the bill’s impact devastates the sport.
TKO brought in a ringer
Luke Thomas attended the Education & Workforce Committee hearing in December 2025, where Lonnie Ali and TKO COO Ike Epstein testified, and his account of Congressional proceedings should give readers a feel for just how locked in TKO’s lobbying effort was:
Luke Thomas: There’s no organized resistance. There’s no resistance whatsoever. TKO’s lobbyists, I cannot tell you how many lobbyists they fucking have on this.
Also, it’s not just TKO lobbyists. It’s also representative, like, different staffers with different representatives who were helping Lonnie Ali. But there she was with staffers related to, I think, Brian Jack, the guy who had introduced the legislation, as well as some TKO lobbyists. They were all having lunch together. They were all sitting together. They were all coming in and out together.
I saw a bunch of new ones this time. I saw some of the same faces, including their head one, who, by the way, came up to me and he knew some things about me. He even told me he looked up some things about me after our little encounter before. He’s a very nice gentleman. He’s obviously quite bright.
He was curious about our little, after we had a bit of a clash last time, but he was the former head of lobbying for Netflix and now he’s the head of lobbying for TKO. Dude, this is over.
This is over. It’s probably been over for some time, but it’s definitely over now.
Dean Garfield, TKO’s Senior Vice President of Government Affairs, is the lobbyist Luke refers to above.
Here’s a couple of details from the TKO press release when they announced they’d hired Garfield away from Netflix:
Garfield brings more than 20 years of public policy experience to the role, including 15 years in media and entertainment. Most recently, Garfield was Netflix’s Vice President of Public Policy, where he served as a key member of the executive team, building and leading the company’s global government affairs function and pursuing incentive packages globally.
Prior to joining Netflix in 2019, Garfield served as President and CEO of the Information Technology Industry Council; as EVP and Chief Strategic Officer for the Motion Picture Association (MPA); and as VP of legal affairs at the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).
Garfield was appointed by President Barack Obama to the White House’s Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiations and was re-appointed by President Donald Trump. He was also appointed to the Department of Transportation Advisory Committee on Automation.
Garfield received a law degree from New York University School of Law and a master’s degree in International Affairs and Public Administration from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, where he was a Ford-Rockefeller as well as a Root-Tilden-Snow scholar, respectively.
The power of the political machine Ari Emanuel has built is reflected in the fact that only a single U.S. Rep. voted against it.
Hat’s off to Rep. Joe Courtney (D-CT). #respect
Jake Donovan at Boxing Scene published Rep. Courtney’s comments from the floor. Well worth reading.
The fans in the YouTube comments for the hearing had Rep. Joe’s back FWIW:
TKO isn’t fucking about in their lobbying efforts.
But they are fucking around with boxing.
‘Impressive in its brazen gall’
The Boxing Tribune’s Paul Magno summed up the bill brilliantly:
TKO Group’s rewritten Ali Act—the Muhammad Ali American Boxing Revival Act, headed to the House of Representatives for a vote tomorrow, March 24—is almost impressive in its brazen gall. It’s essentially a revision of the original Ali Act, but with provisions added that completely contradict the law’s core purpose. Specifically, it undermines the safeguards meant to protect fighters from coercive contracts and to force financial transparency.
It creates a “here are the laws, except for my company” workaround that, not surprisingly, works to the great-- and currently singular-- benefit of TKO Group and its boxing branch, Zuffa Boxing. It’s a little like setting a 55 mph speed limit, but with an “except my car when I’m late for work” provision built in.
In TKO/Zuffa’s particular case, the changes to the original Ali Act would allow them to create belts, make rankings, serve as promoters, operate as managers, and generally have all power and revenue flow entirely through them, as they bathe in the baby blood of coercive contracts and focused dickery. And while their mouthpieces tout this “fighters can choose to be with us or not” line, the combat sports conglomerate-- backed by Saudi Arabian money and copious amounts of behind-the-scenes skulduggery-- is simultaneously working to make sure there is no competition.
John Nash cited a true authority on the original Ali Act and its complete inversion in the “Revival Act” for Uncrowned:
Pat English, a lead drafter of the original Ali Act, was more direct in his written testimony to the committee: The bill “was substantially drafted by lobbyists” for Zuffa and its various subdivisions, he wrote. When John McCain and his staff drafted the original Acts in 1999, English wrote, “there was no agenda but one. That agenda was to make boxing better, safer, and more fair to boxers. There was no intent at all to favor any single promotional entity. That is not the case here.”
There is also a truth-in-labeling problem worth noting at the outset. Supporters of this legislation have repeatedly claimed that the Ali Act is not being amended — only the Professional Boxing Safety Act. English addresses this directly: They are one and the same series of federal laws. The Professional Boxing Safety Act came first in 1996 and was amended by the Muhammad Ali Act. To market the bill as anything other than an amendment to the Ali Act is, as English puts it, simply false — and “if the proposed amendment is being billed untruthfully, it calls into question the honesty of those who are pushing for it.”
And just who is pushing for it?
Why Ari Emanuel, Capo di Tutti Capo of Combat Sports, of course — and this bill wasn’t even the biggest caper Ari pulled off this week!
No, that would be persuading US President Donald J. Trump to push through the most-hated merger of the decade.
Blame Ari for the LiveNation TicketMaster merger
Check this shit from The Wall Street Journal (who misspelled Ari’s fucking name, what happened to journalism?):
Trump heard about the Live Nation case from friends, including Hollywood talent agent and former Live Nation board member Ariel Emanuel, who told the president it should be settled, according to people familiar with the conversations.
After the trial began in March, Trump began calling around to ask why it hadn’t been settled. What’s the holdup? he wanted to know, according to people familiar with the matter. It was an extraordinary role for a president to play in a routine antitrust investigation.
On March 5, both sides met at the White House to hash things out, according to people familiar with the meeting.
Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino and the company counsel joined officials, including Bondi, White House counsel David Warrington and Slater’s acting replacement. The settlement was signed that day, said people familiar with the matter.
Revisiting this caper helped me understand why Ari was the first major Democratic money player to call for Joe Biden to surrender the Democratic Party’s Presidential nomination in 2024.
After all, it was the Biden admin who made Emanuel and his trusty sidekick Mark Shapiro surrender their LiveNation board seats in 2021:
The Department of Justice announced today that two executives of Endeavor Group Holdings Inc. – Chief Executive Officer and Director Ariel Emanuel, and President Mark Shapiro – have resigned their positions on the Live Nation Entertainment Inc. Board of Directors after the department expressed concerns that their positions on the Live Nation Board created an illegal interlocking directorate. An interlocking directorate is where one person – or an agent of one person or company – serves as an officer or director of two companies. Section 8 of the Clayton Act prohibits the same person or company from serving as an officer or director of two competing companies, except under certain defined safe harbors.
Endeavor and Live Nation compete closely in many sports and entertainment markets. Both Live Nation and Endeavor, through its wholly owned and minority owned subsidiaries, promote and sell tickets and VIP packages that include tickets, lodging and travel accommodations, to live music, sporting and other entertainment events. Based on U.S. revenues, the interlock did not qualify for any of the Section 8 safe harbors.
Ari and Mark can’t lose for winning, and when they do notch an “L”, it’s remembered, and people are punished down the road, even if those people are former POTUS Joe Biden.
And as club boxing promoter Larry Goldberg recently commented, it will be leadership at The Association of Boxing Commissions who get stuck with the task of being TKO’s hall monitors.
Why no opposition from either party?
It’s not complicated.
The DC GOP is completely terrorized by POTUS Trump. They saw what happened to Marjorie Taylor Greene and what’s happening to Thomas Massie.
Everyone in the GOP knows that TKO is tight with Trump, so no one is going to step up and oppose a Trump-backed bill.
Ari Emanuel is a consummate Trump insider, as evidenced by his role in killing the LiveNation-TicketMaster merger and helping make the Skydance-Paramount-WBD mergers happen.
And thanks to Dana White functioning as a human political shield, Ari isn’t publicly tainted by association with Trump and the GOP’s white working-class base.
On the Democratic side of the aisle, Ari’s take-down of Joe Biden (and Biden campaign co-chair Jeffrey Katzenberg) is the stuff of legend.
Two years ago, Katzenberg was the biggest Dem money bundler in Hollywood; in 2026, he’s history.
That’s why Democrats from all over the country are coming to Hollywood to kiss the ring, per The Ankler:
Thus far, 2028 presidential hopefuls including, Wes Moore, Josh Shapiro and Andy Beshear have made the rounds in Los Angeles, along with both Georgia senators, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff. (On Friday, Gov. Shapiro will attend a fundraiser at the Sherman Oaks home of JSSK founding partner P.J. Shapiro and WME senior policy & political advisor Hannah Linkenhoker.)
Poor Rep. Joe Courtney, the lone vote against the Ari Emanuel Act, is going to be sitting all alone in the House of Representatives cafeteria for the foreseeable future.
Nate Wilcox founded Bloody Elbow in 2007 and sold it in 2024.