PARIS, July 17: Evander holyfield retains the WBA heavyweight title after Mike Tyson is disqualified for biting. Lennox Lewis keeps his WBC heavyweight belt because Henry Akinwande doesn't want to fight.

Boxing is in a mess with fans increasingly turned off by fighters who quit when the going gets tough, or simply turn their backs and burst into tears. What the sport needs now is better leadership. What it is getting instead is more and more leadership, some of it highly suspect.

Incredibly, there are now 13 organisations sanctioning world title fights.In addition to the long-established trio of the World Boxing Council (WBC), World Boxing Association (WBA) and International Boxing Federation (IBF), the World Boxing Organisation (WBO) has recently gained credibility with champions including Naseem Hamed, Steve Collins and Lonnie Bradley.

But what can one make of the WBF, the IBC, the IBU, the WBF, the WBU, the WAA, the WBB, the IBO and even the UBF?

Many of these organisations take sanctioning fees from gullible promoters often in countries where boxing is a fledgling sport for the right to promote `world' title bouts.

Trusting fans then hand over hard-earned cash to watch so-called title fights that would been regarded as poor club fights a decade or two ago. Many of the `world championship' participants have had only a handful of pro bouts.

Most fight fans could name WBA champion Holyfield and his WBC counterpart Lewis. The IBF champion Michael Moorer also has his admirers.

Who, though, can take seriously IBC champion Mike Grant of the United States or IBO champion Brian Nielsen of Denmark ? Both are unbeaten but have faced largely hand-picked opponents.

And what of 37-year-old WBB champion Iran Barkley, a bloated former middleweight who won his title by beating 42-year-old Gerrie Coetzee?Fidel Hernandez won the middleweight title of the newly-formed UBF after only eight pro fights, while Michael Corleone, who has won only seven of his 15 pro fights, got a crack at the IBU light-welter title.

Jose Luis Madrid, who has won little more than half of his fights, was deemed good enough to fight for the WBB welter title. The examples are endless.

And it is not only at world title level that fans are being misled by the growing number of alphabet boys.

In North America, a boxer can fight for either the NABF, NABO, NABU or USBA title. That means several fighters can claim to be the North American heavyweight champion a clearly preposterous situation.

But wait...there's more. The WBC has its Continental Americas title and the WBA has its own North American Championship. There is also the IBC America's Belt held by mighty Marcus McIntyre.

Thankfully there is only one European title and one Commonwealth title in each division, but further adding to the chaos -- the major sanctioning bodies also have `second division' titles that can be contested by boxers ranked outside the top 10 in that groups' rankings.

The WBC has `international' titles, the IBF and WBO promote `intercontinental' titles and there are dozens of other continental or junior titles.

Even in the Asia-Pacific region there are a swag of title to be contested by only a relatively small group of fighters.

The Orient and Pacific Boxing Federation was the original body, now there is the Pan Asian Boxing Federation and the Asia-Pacific Federation. Joe Bugner, a 47-year-old in his fourth decade as a pro, is the Pan Asian heavyweight champion.

The latest issue of the magazine Independent World Boxing Rankings, which attempts to keep track of the myriad of title and organisations, lists no fewer than 60 heavyweights who own either a current title or a past one.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.