Mayweather-Pacquiao is over and boxing is dead, again.
The record-smashing numbers done by Mayweather-Pacquiao won’t save
boxing any more than years of mainstream neglect will kill it. The sport
is permanently adhered to our culture
The numbers are in and they’re predictably huge, with the Floyd Mayweather-Manny Pacquiao blockbuster clocking in at 4.4m pay-per-view buys.
Since the event, fans, pundits and everyone with an opinion have given their own not-so-unique insight as to the grandiose meaning of what we all saw.
But rather than weighing heavily on the conscious of the public and changing the world forever, the biggest boxing event in the world simply happened – as most things tend to.
The grand fanfare and fluffed majesty of an event the magnitude of Mayweather-Pacquiao not only came as no surprise, but it actually tagged along for the ride, symbiotic in that it both fueled interest in the fight itself, and grew larger as interest grew. It’s part of the package deal that comes with fights literally years and hundreds of millions of dollars in the making.
What outsiders and major news entities didn’t appear to understand, however, is that the rapid expansion in boxing coverage irks a number of boxing’s fans. The nearly superfluous attention added to the excitement of a hasty promotion that already read like a fever dream, but after years of relegation to the second and third tiers of mainstream sports coverage, dedicated boxing fans have become resistant to change. Past a generalized sense of nostalgic bias, fight fans grow accustomed to putting up with injustices and nonsense despite constantly complaining about them. Most importantly, the familiar shenanigans become easier to recognize.
When Premier Boxing Champions was hatched and immediately exalted earlier this year, it seemed to give boxing fans a peek at what happens when people, who obviously don’t spend the required minimum of 73% of their waking moments watching, reading or arguing about boxing, talk about the sport publicly. NBC, CBS and others had been convinced to once again serve boxing to the masses, but the loyalists felt shortchanged by the production and commentating crews, specifically, and mostly because they weren’t boxing enough.
The PBC experiment is ongoing, and may still be ultimately very successful. PBC is an idea, though; a process that may only have a serious payoff long-term. Mayweather-Pacquiao was one fight. It was one massive fight, and certainly a big deal – literally no one could argue that it wasn’t – but it’s easy to get roped into standard hyperbole and oversimplification of the diverse boxing ecosystem.
In the rush to finish pre-fight masterpieces, wordsmiths painted phrases like, “Mayweather-Pacquiao is the fight to save boxing” with brushstrokes wide as the list of celebrities littered throughout the crowd at the MGM Grand Garden Arena on Saturday night, and displayed them across pages full of backhanded compliments to the realm of pugilism.
Yes, Mayweather-Pacquiao was an enormous event, and it could prove to be an economic boon to the rest of the sport, as some of the attention trickles down to lesser commodities. But the idea that boxing requires a few-years-late mega-fight to somehow keep it afloat is a dated idea, and supported by evidence that also indicates that boxing’s popularity moves in waves.
Boxing has been here before – nursing a big event hangover, fighting off the Reaper – and it will be here again.
Around the start of the 20th century, what the New York Times called an “Attack on the Horton Law” signaled what may have been the first attempt to truly save boxing, via a rebellious push by owners of local athletic clubs to host fight cards in the shadow of the sport’s impending fall. There was good reason to fear for boxing’s safety back then, though, as the sport was largely dependent upon public support and favorable legislation.
When the Lewis Law was put in place in August 1900, banning prizefighting in New York, other jurisdictions – specifically the West Coast – benefited from the ban of boxing in New York and other locales. It would be a few years before fighters like Ted ‘Kid’ Lewis and Jimmy Wilde helped truly popularize a more modern version of prizefighting in the UK, Philadelphia Jack O’Brien and others briefly fled to England, where the National Sporting Club, one of the earliest known boxing governing organizations, had been formed in 1891.
The June 1985 edition of The Ring featured an article by historian Luckett V Davis, in which he wrote, “Had the ban [on boxing] continued indefinitely, it is probable that boxing history would have been greatly changed, or indeed cut short.”
But boxing came back to the New York boroughs from 1911 to 1917, then returned for good in 1920, and New York City remained the true ‘Mecca of Boxing’ for most of its tenure.
An unnamed athletic club manager suggested to the Times in 1900 that the most effective way to keep boxing legal would be to ban heavyweight fights. “There would not be so many complaints if the clubs did not have heavyweight fights. Ministers or others rarely complain when featherweights, bantams and lightweights fight, for the average clergyman or reformer believes only a big man can hit hard enough to injure his opponent.”
Ironically, before long, boxing would be shouldered through the consciousness of the public by one of the first ever professional sports mega-celebrities: heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey. And again by Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano, though non-heavyweights like Ray Robinson and Willie Pep commanded attention in their own right.
To complete the cycle of irony, in 1961, when Dempsey marked 66 brine-soaked years on the planet, he remarked to an Associated Press reported that he plainly saw signs boxing was dying. ‘The Manassa Mauler’ wasn’t completely off his rocker yet, as senator and chair of the US Antitrust and Monopoly Subcommittee Estes Kefauver caught on to the inherent criminal activity in boxing – and specifically the International Boxing Club of New York – which led to jail time for many involved, including a number of notorious Chicago and New York City mafiosi. Corruption, boxing’s stubborn remora for decades, had been legally proven and laid bare, and boxing wasn’t in a good place.
Then came a heavyweight champion named Cassius Clay, renamed Muhammad Ali, and former champion Marciano told Boston sportswriter Bucky Yardume, “Boxing is dead.”
By then everyone should have known better.
One full decade of Ali’s quips, triumphs and follies later, journalist Joan Ryan said in her 1972 column at The Star, “I guess if the good Lord hadn’t intended to save boxing, He wouldn’t have given Muhammad Ali a mouth.”
The late 1970s ratings scandal involving The Ring magazine nudged major television networks to swear off boxing, and a mostly unpopular heavyweight champion in Larry Holmes combined with post-Ali melancholia, laying the groundwork for a quartet of sub-heavyweights to change the narrative.
Ray Leonard, Marvin Hagler, Thomas Hearns and Roberto Duran later became known as ‘The Fabulous Four’, thanks in part to a promotional VHS tape distributed by promoter Top Rank. Duran-Leonard I began the four-way rivalry in 1980, and Leonard-Hagler in 1987, for all intents and purposes, brought it to a close. Even so, most of the Fab Four’s action took place early, the lull before 1987 had boxing looking to Olympians and even the veritable abyss below the lightweight division. In September 1985, the cover story of The Ring by editor Nigel Collins posed the question: ‘Can Barry McGuigan Save Boxing?’
February 1986 kicked off the hagiography of Mike Tyson that was the rest of the 1980s in boxing, with his network television debut on ABC against Jesse Ferguson. But Tyson gave way to James ‘Buster’ Douglas, who gave way to Evander Holyfield, and success. An entertaining era of heavyweight boxing in the 90s ended with Lennox Lewis, another unpopular champion, at the top.
Oscar De La Hoya’s popularity boomed in the absence of a defining heavyweight figure, and then so did that of Pacquiao. And of course Mayweather.
No matter where boxing strayed, it never seemed far from home. In 1973, when writing for the New York Times, Al Harvin called boxing “one of the reasons there are more television sets than bathtubs in the United States”.
The pattern is clear enough to be painted by numbers, yet the insistence that boxing walks a thin, precipitous edge at every given moment is not only prevalent from mainstream media, but the norm. Also apparent is boxing’s adaptability, as it compromises tradition and veers off known paths to survive before eventually thriving once more.
The remaining focus of Mayweather-Pacquiao’s success, from the standpoint of boxing’s health, should be less on the disgustingly inflated financial witchcraft that makes it the richest fight ever, and more on the potential residual effects it could have on both viewers and the sport itself.
Mayweather-Pacquiao isn’t staving off the death rattle of a sport so many fans contemplate leaving time and again, but cannot, and will not. The culture of boxing is permanently adhered to the culture of the world, and on the morning of Sunday 3 May, nothing had changed.
That’s not to say there aren’t changes that will likely have to happen if boxing is to thrive. Mayweather’s passive dominance, for instance, can’t keep the public’s attention forever, and seems to be a more difficult sell with every decision win that walks by. Change is inevitable, however, and Mayweather is far closer to retirement than he is to his Olympic medal.
Once he’s gone, some new catalyst will punch his way to the stage.
The byline of the 1985 article by Luckett V. Davis for The Ring reads, “Boxing has always bounced back in the past, and we’re sure it always will.”
theguardian.
Since the event, fans, pundits and everyone with an opinion have given their own not-so-unique insight as to the grandiose meaning of what we all saw.
But rather than weighing heavily on the conscious of the public and changing the world forever, the biggest boxing event in the world simply happened – as most things tend to.
The grand fanfare and fluffed majesty of an event the magnitude of Mayweather-Pacquiao not only came as no surprise, but it actually tagged along for the ride, symbiotic in that it both fueled interest in the fight itself, and grew larger as interest grew. It’s part of the package deal that comes with fights literally years and hundreds of millions of dollars in the making.
What outsiders and major news entities didn’t appear to understand, however, is that the rapid expansion in boxing coverage irks a number of boxing’s fans. The nearly superfluous attention added to the excitement of a hasty promotion that already read like a fever dream, but after years of relegation to the second and third tiers of mainstream sports coverage, dedicated boxing fans have become resistant to change. Past a generalized sense of nostalgic bias, fight fans grow accustomed to putting up with injustices and nonsense despite constantly complaining about them. Most importantly, the familiar shenanigans become easier to recognize.
When Premier Boxing Champions was hatched and immediately exalted earlier this year, it seemed to give boxing fans a peek at what happens when people, who obviously don’t spend the required minimum of 73% of their waking moments watching, reading or arguing about boxing, talk about the sport publicly. NBC, CBS and others had been convinced to once again serve boxing to the masses, but the loyalists felt shortchanged by the production and commentating crews, specifically, and mostly because they weren’t boxing enough.
The PBC experiment is ongoing, and may still be ultimately very successful. PBC is an idea, though; a process that may only have a serious payoff long-term. Mayweather-Pacquiao was one fight. It was one massive fight, and certainly a big deal – literally no one could argue that it wasn’t – but it’s easy to get roped into standard hyperbole and oversimplification of the diverse boxing ecosystem.
In the rush to finish pre-fight masterpieces, wordsmiths painted phrases like, “Mayweather-Pacquiao is the fight to save boxing” with brushstrokes wide as the list of celebrities littered throughout the crowd at the MGM Grand Garden Arena on Saturday night, and displayed them across pages full of backhanded compliments to the realm of pugilism.
Yes, Mayweather-Pacquiao was an enormous event, and it could prove to be an economic boon to the rest of the sport, as some of the attention trickles down to lesser commodities. But the idea that boxing requires a few-years-late mega-fight to somehow keep it afloat is a dated idea, and supported by evidence that also indicates that boxing’s popularity moves in waves.
Boxing has been here before – nursing a big event hangover, fighting off the Reaper – and it will be here again.
Around the start of the 20th century, what the New York Times called an “Attack on the Horton Law” signaled what may have been the first attempt to truly save boxing, via a rebellious push by owners of local athletic clubs to host fight cards in the shadow of the sport’s impending fall. There was good reason to fear for boxing’s safety back then, though, as the sport was largely dependent upon public support and favorable legislation.
When the Lewis Law was put in place in August 1900, banning prizefighting in New York, other jurisdictions – specifically the West Coast – benefited from the ban of boxing in New York and other locales. It would be a few years before fighters like Ted ‘Kid’ Lewis and Jimmy Wilde helped truly popularize a more modern version of prizefighting in the UK, Philadelphia Jack O’Brien and others briefly fled to England, where the National Sporting Club, one of the earliest known boxing governing organizations, had been formed in 1891.
The June 1985 edition of The Ring featured an article by historian Luckett V Davis, in which he wrote, “Had the ban [on boxing] continued indefinitely, it is probable that boxing history would have been greatly changed, or indeed cut short.”
But boxing came back to the New York boroughs from 1911 to 1917, then returned for good in 1920, and New York City remained the true ‘Mecca of Boxing’ for most of its tenure.
An unnamed athletic club manager suggested to the Times in 1900 that the most effective way to keep boxing legal would be to ban heavyweight fights. “There would not be so many complaints if the clubs did not have heavyweight fights. Ministers or others rarely complain when featherweights, bantams and lightweights fight, for the average clergyman or reformer believes only a big man can hit hard enough to injure his opponent.”
Ironically, before long, boxing would be shouldered through the consciousness of the public by one of the first ever professional sports mega-celebrities: heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey. And again by Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano, though non-heavyweights like Ray Robinson and Willie Pep commanded attention in their own right.
To complete the cycle of irony, in 1961, when Dempsey marked 66 brine-soaked years on the planet, he remarked to an Associated Press reported that he plainly saw signs boxing was dying. ‘The Manassa Mauler’ wasn’t completely off his rocker yet, as senator and chair of the US Antitrust and Monopoly Subcommittee Estes Kefauver caught on to the inherent criminal activity in boxing – and specifically the International Boxing Club of New York – which led to jail time for many involved, including a number of notorious Chicago and New York City mafiosi. Corruption, boxing’s stubborn remora for decades, had been legally proven and laid bare, and boxing wasn’t in a good place.
Then came a heavyweight champion named Cassius Clay, renamed Muhammad Ali, and former champion Marciano told Boston sportswriter Bucky Yardume, “Boxing is dead.”
By then everyone should have known better.
One full decade of Ali’s quips, triumphs and follies later, journalist Joan Ryan said in her 1972 column at The Star, “I guess if the good Lord hadn’t intended to save boxing, He wouldn’t have given Muhammad Ali a mouth.”
The late 1970s ratings scandal involving The Ring magazine nudged major television networks to swear off boxing, and a mostly unpopular heavyweight champion in Larry Holmes combined with post-Ali melancholia, laying the groundwork for a quartet of sub-heavyweights to change the narrative.
Ray Leonard, Marvin Hagler, Thomas Hearns and Roberto Duran later became known as ‘The Fabulous Four’, thanks in part to a promotional VHS tape distributed by promoter Top Rank. Duran-Leonard I began the four-way rivalry in 1980, and Leonard-Hagler in 1987, for all intents and purposes, brought it to a close. Even so, most of the Fab Four’s action took place early, the lull before 1987 had boxing looking to Olympians and even the veritable abyss below the lightweight division. In September 1985, the cover story of The Ring by editor Nigel Collins posed the question: ‘Can Barry McGuigan Save Boxing?’
February 1986 kicked off the hagiography of Mike Tyson that was the rest of the 1980s in boxing, with his network television debut on ABC against Jesse Ferguson. But Tyson gave way to James ‘Buster’ Douglas, who gave way to Evander Holyfield, and success. An entertaining era of heavyweight boxing in the 90s ended with Lennox Lewis, another unpopular champion, at the top.
Oscar De La Hoya’s popularity boomed in the absence of a defining heavyweight figure, and then so did that of Pacquiao. And of course Mayweather.
No matter where boxing strayed, it never seemed far from home. In 1973, when writing for the New York Times, Al Harvin called boxing “one of the reasons there are more television sets than bathtubs in the United States”.
The pattern is clear enough to be painted by numbers, yet the insistence that boxing walks a thin, precipitous edge at every given moment is not only prevalent from mainstream media, but the norm. Also apparent is boxing’s adaptability, as it compromises tradition and veers off known paths to survive before eventually thriving once more.
The remaining focus of Mayweather-Pacquiao’s success, from the standpoint of boxing’s health, should be less on the disgustingly inflated financial witchcraft that makes it the richest fight ever, and more on the potential residual effects it could have on both viewers and the sport itself.
Mayweather-Pacquiao isn’t staving off the death rattle of a sport so many fans contemplate leaving time and again, but cannot, and will not. The culture of boxing is permanently adhered to the culture of the world, and on the morning of Sunday 3 May, nothing had changed.
That’s not to say there aren’t changes that will likely have to happen if boxing is to thrive. Mayweather’s passive dominance, for instance, can’t keep the public’s attention forever, and seems to be a more difficult sell with every decision win that walks by. Change is inevitable, however, and Mayweather is far closer to retirement than he is to his Olympic medal.
Once he’s gone, some new catalyst will punch his way to the stage.
The byline of the 1985 article by Luckett V. Davis for The Ring reads, “Boxing has always bounced back in the past, and we’re sure it always will.”
theguardian.
