A proposal to regulate fighting sports in South Dakota has a key hearing Monday as opponents prepare to try to derail the most controversial part of the plan.
Sen. Mark Johnston, R-Sioux Falls, and others support creating a South Dakota Athletic Commission that would regulate sports such as boxing, kick-boxing and mixed martial arts. South Dakota has no such commission, meaning those events either avoid the state or happen without oversight.
The result, Johnston argues, is people getting hurt or even killed fighting in unsanctioned bouts. The athletic commission created in Senate Bill 84 would be able to create rules.
But Gov. Dennis Daugaard and others say the athletic commission would legitimize these violent sports and lead to more, not fewer, people getting hurt.
“I’m offended that the state would legitimize cage-fighting and the bloody violence that those kinds of spectacles create,” Daugaard said in January. “I think it’s interesting that we declare that it is a crime for one human being to strike another, and yet the state now proceeds to legitimize, and label a sport, cage-fighting.”
Rep. Steve Hickey, R-Sioux Falls, feels the same way. When SB84 comes up for a hearing at 10 a.m. Monday, he plans to offer an amendment he sees as a compromise — creating the athletic commission, but limiting it to sports such as boxing and traditional martial arts such as karate and judo. Mixed martial arts would be banned.
“The conversation on violence in society needs to start somewhere — why not with our most violent entertainment, and that’s mixed martial arts,” Hickey said. “There’s a reason two governors have been reticent to appoint a commission: It’s because they agree with me that elbowing a guy in the head, kneeing him in the face, is beyond where we need to go.”
The supporters of the athletic commission proposal aren’t getting on board with Hickey’s alternative. They defended mixed martial arts from Hickey’s characterization of it as unusually brutal.
Johnston said he appreciates Hickey’s “societal concerns” but disagrees with his judgment.
Source: ArgusLeader.com