Fred Levin doesn't even play golf, but when he discovered the parcel of land adjacent to his waterfront mansion in Florida was on the market he snapped it up and commissioned former PGA Tour player Jerry Pate to design a par three hole on the property.

Levin's kitchen window overlooks the neatly contoured green, replete with two bunkers filled with shimmering white sand. The gardener trims the green each morning, and once or twice a year a visitor actually goes out and plays the hole.

Levin's eclectic art collection ranges from a few Picassos to a lot of LeRoy Neimans. He also owns an impressive array of sporting memorabilia, and, since his home abuts the Gulf of Mexico, he parks a mildly ostentatious yacht out back.

A few years ago a particularly ferocious hurricane blew his boat dock into splinters. Levin ensured that this would never happen again by ordering the dock replaced with one constructed entirely of Italian marble.

Last year, Levin was the lead attorney in the state of Florida's lawsuit against the tobacco industry, which resulted in a $13 billion settlement. His fee from that transaction alone came to $275 million, payable over 10 years. From the initial instalment, he donated some $10 million to the University of Florida Law School, which was almost immediately renamed the Frederick G Levin Law School.

In short, Fred Levin is not only a fellow accustomed to getting his way, but also a man blessed with the wherewithal to facilitate his wishes. So, while his proposal this week to create a single organisation, backed by a corporate sponsor, to replace boxing's confusing melange of alphabet-soup sanctioning bodies may seem at once far-fetched, ambitious and naive, it would probably be a mistake to dismiss it out of hand.

"We'd like to go back to the old days, when everybody knew who the champion was, and the respect boxing had," said Levin this week on the eve of Roy Jones' light-heavyweight unification bout against Reggie Johnson. "It was the great sport."

Although Levin represents other boxers, Jones is clearly the crown jewel of his stable, making the timing of this week's announcement all the more curious. Jones, arguably the world's best pound-for-pound fighter, already owns recognition from the World Boxing Association (WBA) and the World Boxing Council (WBC), and stands poised to add Johnson's International Boxing Federation (IBF) championship as well if the bout proceeds according to expectations.

Although the proliferation of bodies sanctioning "world" championships had by last count reached seven or eight, it hasn't always been that way. For most of this century boxing, or at least American boxing, was run largely at the pleasure of the National Boxing Association, a shady organisation whose heavy-handed practices eventually invited the scrutiny of a congressional investigation.

The first coup d'etat occurred along about the time the Kefauver Commission was in the process of probing underworld ties to boxing, when an enterprising group of gentlemen recognised that the time was ripe to remove the sport from the control of corrupt, Italian-American thugs by replacing them with corrupt, South American thugs. Thus was born the World Boxing Association.

The breakaway World Boxing Council, formed a few years later, soon shared in the booty. American television networks, with the power to make or break either organisation, decided to toe the line, since it instantly doubled the number of available "world" titles.

For the better part of 35 years the WBC has functioned under the auspices of its president-for-life, Senor Jose Sulaiman Chagnon, once accurately described by promoter Bob Arum as "a fat Mexican dictator". The WBA, in the meantime, has spawned at least two more splinter organisations: the IBF, formed in the wake of then-New Jersey commissioner Bob Lee's failed takeover at the 1983 WBA convention, and the World Boxing Organisation (WBO), the product of another unsuccessful palace revolt a decade or so ago.

Others, having observed television's eagerness to do business with all of the above, were encouraged to form their own sanctioning bodies, each sillier than the last. Former baseball player Dean Chance, for instance, runs something called the International Boxing Association (IBA). Top Rank, Arum's outfit, was criticised for masquerading IBA championship bouts as "world" title fights on the grounds that the upstart organisation had "no credibility".

"Are you suggesting," asked Arum, quite reasonably, we thought, "that the others do?"

Levin isn't the first man to come along with the suggestion that it is time to change the multiple champions and fan confusion caused by the proliferation of sanctioning bodies, but he may be the first to act on it.

Taking an idea whose germination came during his testimony this March before a Senate committee investigating professional boxing, Levin has proposed a start-up date of January 2000 for what would be known as the World Boxing League (WBL), which would be underwritten by a major corporate sponsor.

Although Levin mentioned Pepsi-Cola, he may have just been throwing out a name. A better bet might be Nike, whose former president, Terdema Ussery (now the CEO of the NBA Dallas Mavericks), helped to formulate the proposal.

"I basically said private-sector sponsorship, rather than legislation, is really the answer," Levin recalled his Senate testimony of this spring.

In Levin's overview, the WBL might not immediately displace the alphabet bodies, but would, by gradually diminishing the significance of their championships, ultimately diminish their influence as well.

Murad Muhammad, officially the promoter of Saturday night's Mississippi card and Levin's sometime rival for Jones' affections within the champion's complicated camp, voiced some doubt about the workability of Levin's proposal.

"Every time someone comes into the world with a new sanctioning group like the IBC and the like, all alphabets, no one knows who they are," Muhammad said. "So how could you come on the level of the IBF, WBC and WBA? These guys have been here."

At the same time, the promoter conceded that a wealthy sponsor with deep pockets might be able to sustain the league over the long haul.

Levin pointed out that a corporate sponsor would give the sport legitimacy through a recognisable, credible brand name, "similar to NASCAR's Winston Cup".

That's right, the guy who made the cigarette industry cry "Uncle!" to the tune of $13 billion actually used the Winston Cup as a paradigm for his grand design. Now, I ask you, would you bet against anyone that brazen?