PART THREE: FOR THE TITLE
A phoney champion

If you’re unfamiliar with boxing, it’s not quite like other sports. There is no one world champion. For starters, logically, there’s 17 different weight divisions. But within each division, there’s as many as 12 world champions - because there’s no single world governing body for the sport, and just about anybody can and does start up their own one, because the sanctioning fees for world titles can be easy money.

The World Boxing Federation (WBF) sits probably seventh or eighth in the list of world titles - behind the reputable WBC, WBA, WBO and IBF, then the more lightly-regarded IBO, and so forth. Their Asia-Pacific title is merely a regional belt, and there probably wasn’t a queue of people willing to pay a fee to fight for it. But despite all that, Singh’s fight against Iobe Ledua, at Cha-am, Petchaburi in Thailand on August 7, 2012, is important, for it’s the one that allows Singh - erroneously, of course, considering all the qualifications listed above - to call himself the first Indian heavyweight champion of the world.

Why would two Fijian boxers want to fight for a regional title on what appears to be, from the YouTube video, a Thai beach? Why indeed, asks Thomson with a knowing smile.

Confusingly, Singh’s opponent for the WBF Asia-Pacific heavyweight title, Iobe Ledua, was an actual boxer with a reasonable 12-12 record. And by this stage of our tale, it seems clear that an actual boxer would have made short work of Rohit Singh.

But this fight was even more laughable than the others. After just 15 seconds of the first round, without offering a single punch of his own, a series of half-hearted body shots send Ledua to his knees. After another 25 seconds, and still having not connected with a punch, Ledua takes another gentle punch in the stomach and drops to a knee, staring at the canvas as the referee counts him out.

Stuff showed the video to Jim Mahoney, one of New Zealand’s most experienced boxing writers. He pulled a disgusted face. “Oh, this is pathetic,” he declares. “There is no way in the world he is going to knock someone down with these powder-puff punches. Neither him nor any of his opponents have any right being in the boxing ring.” (Watch the footage as part of the audiobook at the top of this page.)

What transpired became clear when Stuff spoke with Farmaan Ali, a longtime Fijian boxing trainer, promoter and official. He knows Iobe Ledua well, and says it is “a fact” that the fight was fixed. Ledua was at his career’s end and needed the money. And Singh never paid up, Farmaan says.

Ledua himself, when contacted, immediately and without hesitation agreed it was a fix. And, yes, he says, Singh hadn’t paid up the full amount they had agreed for him to deliberately lose.

Ledua was 36 at the time, and planning to retire from boxing. He had few prospects in the ring, and he was struggling: his house had burned down in 2011 and he was still renting. Singh told him that as a fellow Fijian, he knew how tough it was, and offered him $3000 (Fijian, about NZ$2080) to fall down in the first round.

“That was his plan,” says Ledua. “I told him: ‘If that’s your plan, then pay me good money, if you want to take that title ... you are going to take a world ranking title, I am losing everything.’”

Ledua clearly felt that the nature of the fix was demeaning. “I told him: ‘Even if you go up to three or four rounds, then I do go down?’ He said: ‘Brother, I want you to go down first round.’ I wanted to make it four rounds for the crowd, they want to come watch boxing.”

Ledua snorts at his memory of the ‘fight’. “There was no punch to my body or my head,” he says.

Ledua says two days after he got back to Fiji, Singh stopped contacting him. He had paid up just $F1500 of the agreed $F3,000. When it’s suggested to Ledua that Singh ripped him off, he says: “He did, brother. He did.”

REPORTER & NARRATOR
STEVE KILGALLON

DESIGN & VIDEO ANIMATION
AARON WOOD

DEVELOPMENT
SUYEON SON

VISUALS
CHRIS McKEEN

SOUND
ABIGAIL DOUGHERTY

EDITOR
JOHN HARTEVELT