A.B.C. Selects MMA Record Keeper
Published by on March 25th, 2008 in Almanac

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By MMAMemories.com:

The Association of Boxing Commissions, know throughout boxing circles as the ABC, has for years appointed an official record keeper for boxing, which served as a centralized database to which all regulatory bodies could pull information. With the rapid emergence of mixed martial arts (MMA), the organization felt the need to engage a similar outfit to provide information for common access.

The ABC selected a company called MMA, LLC to maintain this database. This entity, run by Kirik Jenness and Gabriel Smallman, also operates the website MMA.tv, which covers the mixed martial arts world.

The way the record-keeping process works is that all of the commissions throughout the United States that regulate MMA will be required to send their results in to the MMA LLC people, usually within a period of about 48 hours. The record-keeper will then enter it into a database, which will have the strength of being the product of results that are certified by regulatory bodies. Fighters who have been knocked out and are suspended by a jurisdiction will be placed on a centralized Suspension list, so that those suspensions, as well as any other disciplinary actions, can be honored by all the other jurisdictions.

Most likely the commissions will also send past results in, so as to combined with MMA LLC’s existing body of data to form what would be known as an “historical database.” This will ideally allow for commissions to able to easily access a record of any fighter who is active in the United States, going back for as long as that fighter has been active, in order to assist them in the process of approving matches. The ultimate goal of course is to ensure the competitiveness of matches, as well as the preservation of fighter safety. With data kept in a central location it is more difficult for a fighter to be knocked out in one state and fight in another before their suspension will have expired.

A company called Fight Fax is responsible for maintaining records in boxing, over which the ABC supervises, not in an official government capacity per see but as a cooperative trade association of all member commissions. As per the Professional Boxing Safety Act and the Muhammad Ali Act, a commission that places a fighter on suspension will have that fighter entered by the record-keeper on the national suspension list, and the suspending jurisdiction must issue an order to take the fighter off that list when the conditions of such a suspension are satisfied.

Reportedly a number of applicants made presentations to the ABC, and after a screening process, the decision was made by a special committee in Kansas City, not far from where the association, headed by Missouri’s Tim Lueckenhoff, is headquartered.