They were mixing it at the Boxing Writers’ Club dinner in London’s Mayfair this week. Not in the nose-biffing sense, of course. The annual bash of the pugilistic cognoscenti is always a model of decorum, cauliflower ears sponged and pressed (and that’s just the scribes) and everyone chirpily swapping yarns rather than punches. No, the exchanges were friendly rather than fistic, none more so than the one-time fractious professional and amateur elements of the of the fight fraternity.
 

There is a new togetherness now that can only be good for the game. Thankfully gone are the days of the apartheid between the headguards and vests brigade and  those who punched for pay that was as viciously imposed as that which once existed between Rugby Union and Rugby League. Colin Moynihan , the British Olympic Association (BOA) chairman, who won a boxing Blue for Oxford as a bantamweight, still chuckles when he recalls how he was suspended by the simon pure blazerati of Amateur Boxing Association (ABA) for sparring with pros at the famous Thomas A’Beckett gym in South London.

 

There was a time too, when the ABA would not share the same room as the professional British Boxing Board of Control with whom discussions have subsequently started about the possibility of boxing eventually coming under a single umbrella body.

 

This is the same ABA who, together with then freshly-constituted British Amateur Boxing Association, this year took a table at our Club dinner, a function traditionally dominated by the professional element. Of course, all the big name pros or ex-pros  there, including Frank Bruno, Chris Eubank, Billy Walker, John H Stracey, Charlie Magri, Lloyd Honeyghan, James DeGale and Tony Jeffries were all former  top amateurs. And that was always the bone of contention.

 

For inevitably the amateurs lost their best men to the professional stables and how it rankled.
 

Now these are more enlightened times. The barriers have been eased down and the twin aspects of boxing are sensibly learning to work together. Pros and amateurs now spar regularly. It was not generally known that the successful Beijing Olympic squad took four paid sparring partners with them to their pre-Games camp in Macau at the instigation of then national coach Terry Edwards. It worked well.

 

Now two former world class pros, Robert McCracken, the one-time British middleweight champion who now trains world champion Carl Froch, and Richie Woodhall, ex-world super-middleweight champion, are now consultants to Britain’s new national squad. Woodhall is currently with them on their boxing tour of the United States and Finland.
 

Fittingly too, the personable young amateur bantamweight Luke Campbell (pictured in blue), from Hull, Britain’s first Euro champ for almost half a century, followed unbeaten pro Kell Brook on to the rostrum to receive a Best Young Boxer award at the dinner.
 

This rapprochement is not only heartening but practical ,as nowadays boxing is fast becoming a pro-am sport anyway. Lottery funding means the best amateurs can train full time and be pros in all but name. And in fact when the new World Series, devised by AIBA, the international governing body for amateur boxing, gets under way, they will be pros in actuality too.

 

For so handsome are the proposed rewards in the global team tournament (five three minute rounds, sans vest and headguards) that most will earn more than they might as fledgling fighters on professional promotions within prize money ranging from US$30,000 (£18,000) to $300,00 (£180,000).
 

More details are likely to be unveiled when BABA and the ABA jointly launch their “Road to London 2012” mission at the House of Commons on November 9. For guest of honour will be Dr C K Wu, the new Taiwanese President of AIBA. While Dr Wu may sound like someone who tripped off George Formby’s ukulele, he is becoming a significant voice on the Olympic scene.

 

Not that his new baby, financially weaned by sports marketing giants IMG,is being welcomed into the world by everyone in the sport. In fact the incipient "professionalisation" of amateur boxing is believed to be one of the reasons why Kevin Hickey’s spell as BABA’s performance director was so short-lived.

But most see Dr Wu’s move, like the introduction of women’s boxing into the Olympics, as both progressive and necessary. Though it does lead us to wonder now the last bastion of the Olympics has been breached whether the day is not far off far off when boxers who have had only a few fights in the professional prize ring will be allowed to compete over three rounds in the Olympics should they wish to do so.

 

After all, tennis. basketball, and now golf, are entitled to field their top professionals and I can even envisage a future situation in which boxing has an open tournament at, say  under-23 level, as in football. Never? That’s what they said only a few years ago when pros and amateurs weren’t allowed to share the same table, let alone the same ring.

Now, if not exactly hand in boxing glove, they are at least touching gloves and getting ready to come out fighting. Together.  
   
Alan Hubbard is a sports columnist and boxing correspondent of The Independent on Sunday, and a former chairman of The Boxing Writers’ Club. He has covered 11 summer Olympics.