Boxing World Grapples With Threat of AIDS

It used to be regarded as a red badge of courage.

Ringside fans would save programs of fight cards if there were bloodstains on them to show just how close they’d been to the action.

Fighters would measure how badly they had hurt an opponent by the amount of his blood they carried back to the locker room on their gloves or trunks.

Referees and trainers traded war stories on the blood baths they’d been involved in.

Even in football, a linemen would look with pride on the amount of blood soaked into his uniform, provided that blood belonged to the man across the line of scrimmage.

No more.

It’s a new era. A frightening era. The AIDS age.

Ringsiders these days are holding up their programs as shields.

In New Jersey and Florida, state athletic commissions now require referees and seconds to wear surgical style gloves. The New York State Athletic Commission also makes gloves available for both boxing and wrestling personnel, but use of them in that state is optional.

There haven’t been a lot of takers in New York.

“We have found that most people, and I’m talking about 95%, refuse to use the gloves,” said Marvin Kohn, a deputy commissioner with the New York body.

In California, however, there are no such recommendations and no plans to institute any.

Said Marty Denkin, assistant executive officer of the California State Athletic Commission: “The risk of AIDS in boxing is so minor that it has not come up and is something we are not going to address at this time. Because at this point, there is no evidence we have found that indicates AIDS can be transmitted through normal lacerations.

“Besides, if you start, where are you going to stop? I also referee and I’ve gotten more blood in my nose and mouth during a fight than on my hands. If you offer gloves, next they’re going to want goggles and a mask. People at ringside are going to want plexiglass as a safety shield so they don’t get splattered.

“From what we know, AIDS is highly communicable through homosexuality or through intravenous use of drugs. Now nothing is ever absolute, but I would say that for boxers, both of those areas do not come into play.”

Kohn agrees with Denkin that it is unlikely many boxers are going to contract AIDS through dirty needles.

“We conduct drug tests on our fighters and we find that less than 2% test positive,” he said. “Boxers are not drug users, and are probably not going to get involved in the AIDS problem that way.”

To Dr. Robert Karns, a Southern California ringside physician, the chances of contracting AIDS in a boxing situation appear almost farfetched.

“It would take a significant amount of blood, the amount in a transfusion,” he said. “It would have to be transmitted from an open wound into an open wound.

“For example, a fighter would have to have a big gash, say on his forehead, and he would then have to almost press his head onto the head of a referee or corner man who, in turn, had a large gash on his forehead.”

Boxing is not the only sport grappling with the problem, though. Blood has been spilled on the football field as well. The AIDS problem suddenly seemed a lot closer to that sport last October when Jerry Smith, a retired NFL receiver, died as a result of the disease.

“You always worry about it,” said Don Cochren, a Dallas Cowboys trainer. “You see it on the TV screen every night and read about it in the newspaper every day.

“We wear sterile gloves when we’re treating wounds. There’s no proof you can get AIDS that way, but using sterile gloves is a good technique to have anyway.”

The Cowboys went even further last summer when they began testing their players for the disease.

“Each individual player was given an envelope when they were given their examinations,” he said. “If they wanted to be tested for AIDS, they were to sign up and give the envelope to the team doctor. The results of those tests are strictly between the doctor and and the player. I don’t know the exact number who signed up but I think it was somewhere in the 90% range.”

In New York, there is talk of testing fighters for AIDS as well, but the obstacles loom large.

“Would it be cost effective?” Kohn asks. “We would have to have a budget. Right now, a boxer comes into New York and all he is required to do is pay $10 for a license and $19 for a fingerprint check. For that, he already gets a physical worth over $400.

“Adding an AIDS test would make it more expensive. We would have to test 40 to 50 fighters a month. Some say the promoter should pay for it but that would make it really difficult for them.

“The New York City Health Department has an AIDS test that is free, but I don’t know if we could descend on them with all the fighters we’d have to test.”

Even if the testing problem could be worked out, there’s a bigger one that all the money in the city treasury couldn’t solve.

“There’s a four- to six-week wait to get a city AIDS test,” Kohn said. “Add to that the three- to four-week wait for results and you’re looking at a 10-week process. A boxer from out of state usually comes in three to four days before a fight. Even if we could get them in earlier, we wouldn’t know for weeks and weeks if a guy had it.

“And then you have to ask, is there a point to it all? A guy could pass an AIDS test today and then go out and get it tomorrow.

“There’s also a constitutional question whether we even have a right to test for AIDS, although we have been testing for drugs for the last two years. Then too, we don’t know whether, if we find AIDS in a fighter, we have a right, because of rules of confidentiality, to tell other state commissions, ‘This guy has AIDS.’ ”

The problem is also being dealt with in other countries, but in different ways. The British Boxing Board of Control has an AIDS test, but it is given only to foreigners entering the country to fight.

The World Boxing Council held a three-day seminar on AIDS several months ago, flying in 60 doctors from around the world. The result? A recommendation to create educational programs to alert fighters to the danger of AIDS.

“You could say there’s a danger in boxing just as you could say there’s a danger in living,” said Dr. Bernhart S. Schwartz, another California fight physician.

“If you knew a fighter had AIDS, there is still a doubt whether he could transmit it in a ring situation. What they’ve done in New Jersey with surgical gloves is overkill. They’ve really gotten a little nuts about it.”

Nuts or not, New Jersey can at least boast of being a state that took definitive action on the problem, right?

Not exactly, says Larry Hazzard, commissioner of the New Jersey State Athletic Control Board.

“It is becoming mandatory now for our referees and seconds to use surgical gloves but not because of AIDS,” he said. “It just happened to go into effect at the time the AIDS scare is reaching its peak.

“What we are trying to do is something to address the issue of health and hygiene. Refs are always taking mouthpieces out of fighters’ mouths during fights and seconds are always getting blood and perspiration on themselves. There are a lot of cases that foster the transference of bacteria.

“But this has nothing to do with AIDS. We have no evidence that AIDS is transferred through boxing or any other athletic competition. The small amounts of blood involved are not enough. Our rule was never initiated on the premise that we could stop AIDS.”

The story is basically the same in Florida, where gloves are being worn for a six-month trial period that will end Jan. 1. At that point, a re-evaluation will be made.

“We are concerned with sanitation,” said Col. George Porter, executive director of the Florida State Athletic Commission. “It was the opinion of Dr. Theodore Struhl, who is the chairman of our Medical Advisory Council, that when you have people who mess with mouthpieces or deal with cuts, the best thing to do to make the scene more sanitary would be to have the gloves.

“But it is not necessarily for AIDS. I don’t think AIDS is predominant around boxing people.”

The Florida rule requires what are called examination gloves, a cheaper version of the surgical gloves used by physicians. Both referees and cornermen must not only wear them, but change them after each fight.

The law is enforced. A corner man for heavyweight Trevor Berbick tried to shove his gloves into his pocket before a July fight, but was told he’d have to leave the corner if he insisted on staying barehanded.

He put the gloves on.

Seconds in other sections of the country sometimes refuse to wear the gloves, because, they say, it hampers their ability to work on cuts.

Hazzard laughs at such an objection.

“Doctors perform operations with those gloves on,” he says. “If a man can’t work on a cut with gloves on, he shouldn’t be a cut man. In New Jersey, we have had no complaints. Nothing but compliments.”

Lou Filippo, a Southern California referee, doesn’t see the need for gloves.

“It’s remote,” he said of his chances of contracting AIDS in the ring. “The biggest thing you’ve got to worry about as a referee is to protect the fighter.

“But I’ll tell you one thing. If I had an open cut, I wouldn’t ref.”

Joe Goossen, a North Hollywood trainer, feels that in the midst of the controversy, a key point is being overlooked.

“From a trainer’s standpoint, we see just as much blood in the gym during sparring sessions,” he said. “What are you going to do, require surgical gloves there, too? I get blood under my nose and in my eye daily in the gym. I’m constantly handling mouthpieces.

“The whole matter of surgical gloves is a hollow policy. What they are saying is that the blood you get in a gym situation is not important. Just the blood in real fights.

“When a guy really bleeds, you can get it on you from head to toe. Rubber gloves are ineffective. They are not the answer for someone who handles blood every day. There’s no way to stop it, short of requiring a trainer to wear a plastic suit, or maybe a space suit, complete with helmet.”

Denkin would like to see a shift in emphasis away from the subject.

“We have a lot of other priorities to worry about besides AIDS, since there is no evidence of a connection with boxing,” he said. “We are working on getting proper matches, better safety standards, the proper licensing of people. We want to do away with mismatches, get better mouthpieces and gloves. We are always trying to improve officiating. These are high priority items with us.

“Until such time as a link with AIDS can be proven, the use of gloves would only be done for show. This commission has never been one to react just to react. It deals with reality.”

But what is reality?

“The odds are very slight that trainers or other people in boxing are going to contract the disease through their sport,” said Chuck Fallis of the Centers for Disease Control, a federal organization in Atlanta. “But they should use gloves when dealing with blood and blood fluids.

“The AIDS virus doesn’t survive in the open air so it is highly unlikely it could survive to get into another blood stream in a boxing situation. It dies immediately in the air. It can only live in the human blood stream. But football and boxing trainers should wear gloves, just as we would recommend any health care worker do so.”

The same point of view is held in another part of the country.

“Whenever you have a significant amount of blood spilled, you have to handle it carefully,” said Dr. Adan Rios of the Institute for Immunological Disorders in Houston. “You have to use common sense.

“All the talk about AIDS can scare the hell out of you. You have to talk about the possibility of getting AIDS, say, in boxing, and then what is the probability? In between is where you get common sense. First, what is possible? Everything. Yes it is possible to get AIDS this way, although it is highly improbable.

“But that doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that you have standards of hygiene that should be maintained. The common rules of hygiene dictate that when you are applying pressure to a cut or wound, when you are dealing with blood, it makes sense to use gloves.

“We cannot be lackadaisical with health care. You use gloves when you deal with blood. That is an elementary rule of hygiene.”

In the five years that AIDS has spread across the nation, there have been 42,354 documented cases resulting in 24,412 deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control. There are an estimated 1.5 million carriers of AIDS in this country.

“Those numbers may be an underestimation,” Rios says. “But now we as a society are starting to deal with AIDS. It is having an impact in every area of society. Whether it’s boxing or some other area, the important thing is to make people aware.

“This is not an issue of controversy. It’s an issue of common sense.”