F--- boxing

The first fight I remember seeing was Hagler vs. Hearns ... I was really young, 7 or so, and I now, I don't really remember the fight itself, but just that it was an event. My dad had his friends over. It was on the cover of Sports Illustrated (also the first issue I ever read).

Next I remember Tyson/Spinx. At that point I was in the second grade and I remember going into school the next day and talking with friend who had seen it. Again, it was an event.

I'll always love boxing, but it hasn't reached the level of a national event in many years. It's been so horribly mismanaged, I doubt it ever will again.

 

Floyd won't fight a legit welterweight. As talented as he is, his resume is littered with guys past their prime or smaller.

 

In the few days before the Mancini-Kim fight, Sugar Ray Leonard retired (for the first time, detached retina) and Pryor beat Arguello (for the first time, with an assist from Panama Lewis). Heck of a week.

 

As I recall, Cobb said he would take the beating again if Cosell would leave Monday Night Football, too.

 

Boxing is Exhibit A in the business point that you don't make your product more desirable or popular by making it less accessible. By making access to major fights PPV, boxing has basically limited itself to diehards (and more importantly, diehards who watch in bars, therefore keeping another generation of fans from being nurtured).

Are you listening, Big Ten (and just about every other league that has taken its sports out of syndication and off of broadcast TV in favor of specialty pay-for-use channels that cable companies shove onto the sports tier).

 

What was the last big-time, must-see boxing match? Tyson-Lewis back in, what, 2002?
That was the last high-water mark, and maybe boxing's last gasp in the U.S. Not long after that, the Eastern Europeans started winning the titles and the Americans faded from the picture. Lewis was someone Americans could at least identify with, and once he retired that was it. The smaller weight classes are great, but it won't come back until the next great American heavyweight emerges.

 

I remember one of the few attempts to bring boxing back to the major networks about 13 years ago. Mike Tyson's comeback fight against Buster Mathis, Jr. was on Fox. The undercard was a junior middleweight title bout between Terry Norris and Paul Vaden that went the full 12 and was kind of boring. For a half-hour before the Norris fight, they had segmets that only lasted a few minutes with five minutes or so of ads between them.
There was probably more time spent on ads than there was on the fights during the broadcast, probably because they needed to sell that much advertising to pay Tyson.
Still, when commercial breaks are too long or too frequent, they become annoying.

 

I went to a bar that had both. UFC was shit last night too in all honesty. They've had some good cards and some stinkers but since a large but slightly declining portion of their fan base is keyed in on the violence instead of the craft even the horrible mismatches feed a certain desire.

I was surprised the Juarez-John match was so bad because they had an awesome fight on HBO a few months back. I'll still take a big boxing match over most sporting events but they are not happening as much as they should right now. A central commission would change that and the only promoter that might is Oscar de la Hoya's group. Problem with Oscar is that Don King controls all the shitty heavyweights and Bob Arum hates him so any good fighter he has will rarely fight a Golden Boy boxer.

 

Big bouts have been on theater TV or PPV since the 1950s. The killer is that the replay doesn't show up on ABC (RIP, Wide World of Sports) but HBO. It goes from one pay TV to another, and if you don't get that, you're out of luck.

 

And notice that boxing, which was (along with horse racing and baseball) one of the country's three major sports at the dawn of television, has basically completely fallen off the radar screen 2-3 generations later.

It's not surprising that the sport that has, by far, the most broadcast television exposure (professional/college football) is by far the most popular sport. TV exposure has turned NASCAR from a backwater into one of the country's major sports, too. Meanwhile, boxing has zero broadcast television exposure (either live or replay), and has therefore all but fallen off the radar screen, except for a few diehards.

 

I remember Sean O'Grady, whose main skill was bleeding all over the place, being all over TV in the 1970s and early 1980s. And I miss PKA full-contact karate. Brad Hefton was one bad dude, but the most interesting thing to see was when a fighter would miss a punch and his shoulder would fly out of socket. Would happen every other week, it seemed.