BOXERS, trainers, ring officials and promoters who excelled last year won't be honoured for their hard work, as has been the case for more than 30 years.

Ngconde Balfour, chairman of the Boxing South Africa (BSA) board, revealed yesterday that its annual awards ceremony has been scrapped - for now.

"Yes, we are not going to have the annual awards this year after we took a resolution when we came into office in September," confirmed Balfour.

"It's not like we have scrapped the awards altogether.

"We are now planning to have monthly awards, something we never had in the past. Monthly winners will then qualify for the annual awards."

The first awards function was held at Doug Dolan's gymnasium in Durban in 1976.

The awards were then taken over by King Korn, which started sponsoring them in 1979 and ended their involvement in 2002.

From then on a number of sponsors took over until the awards were without a sponsor in 2007 and the provincial governments chipped in.

The last few awards ceremonies were bankrolled by Free State, Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal governments.

"We cannot depend on provinces to finance these awards, it should be Boxing South Africa who determine where an award function should be held," Balfour said.

"We will go out of our way and raise funds to cover future awards functions.

"This does not mean that we are going to shut our doors on provinces who want to take part, but they need to understand that they are not going to dictate to us as it was the case in the past."

Meanwhile, BSA director of operations Loyiso Mtya has revealed that Limpopo and Mpumalanga governments were willing to finance this year's awards ceremony.