I can’t recall the last time the media got hot and bothered about a heavyweight fight. Are they all bums these days? Why no heavyweight stars?
The Heavyweights are just boring right now.
One thing that bothers me personally about the division is the trend towards 7’ 275 # guys that can only go 3 rounds before they are out of gas.
I don’t follow sports much, but historically I’d guess that Don King, personal wealth and ‘a kinder gentler America’ all had a lot to do with it.
The old guys who used to bring fighters from the streets to the top tier have lost power. He may be out now, but Don King gained control and took over the fighters at the top, leaving no one to develop the lower guys. This hurt boxing in America, and the guys from Asia and Latin America tend to fight in the lower weight ratings.
Also, people aren’t as willing to get beat up for money as they used to be, and the whole idea of ‘going to the fights’ is as controverisal as it ever was and even seems a little passe today.
My wife, who is the real expert in the house, says that it’s because they can’t get pay per view contracts; the cable companies don’t see any money in it. This seems ilke a chicken and the egg thing to me though, and I’d say that the big name fighters were already old by the time that this happened.
Or: The Americans aren’t world champions any more?
Okay, but who are the heavyweight champions nowadays and where are they? Like I said, I’m not really looking, but I don’t see any Lewises or Hollyfields, much less any Tysons, Alis or Fraziers.
Part of it, I think, is that there just aren’t as many talented natural heavyweights right now. Instead you’ve got guys like Chris Byrd and Roy Jones Jr. bulking up to fight heavyweight who just lack the punching power that’s always been the hallmark of the great heavyweight fighters. They end up fighting like bulked up welterweights instead of true heavyweights. It lacks the drama of watching firebreathing beasts like Foreman or Liston. Opponents say Liston’s jab (his jab, mind you) was like being rammed by a telephone pole, and Foreman had absolutely bonecrushing power and the highest win-by-KO percentage in boxing history. Then you put someone with that staggering power up against someone like Ali who has the superhuman ability to take that kind of punishment and not only go the distance but to win, and it makes for some high drama and great boxing.
I wonder about that myself. From reading period novels and memoirs, I gather that, a century ago, a championship heavyweight match was the Superbowl, March Madness, the seventh game of the World Series, and the Stanley Cup final all rolled into one. Harpo Marx described how reporters at ringside would communicate blow-by-blow descriptions of the fight via teletype to ticker tape machines that were set up in saloons (!). There, other reporters and rewrite men would rush to get the stories down for the newpapers and journals. Small boys would excitedly hang around outside the saloon doors, hoping for updates from a kindly adult.
The prominence of boxing seems scarcely close to that now. Maybe boxing had an edge in the pre-newsreel, pre-TV age which has now been lost?
There are three primary reasons, I believe:
1. More Sports
A century ago the United States had only three professional sports that the general public really cared about, and one, horse racing, involved animals. The other two were baseball and boxing. Everything else was second tier. At the time there was no pro football, basketball, or hockey in the USA at all, and auto racing was a novelty. The Olympics were about as important an event as your local high school regionals are today.
So it’s partially just the fact that boxing now shares the limelight with football, basketball, etc.
2. Scummy Operators Vs. The Media
However, what’s problematic with blaming just Reason 1 is that the golden day of the heavyweight wasn’t in 1907, it was in 1973 - Ali, Frazier, Foreman, Norton, et al. - when football, basketball, tennis etc. had hit the big time.
I think what’s happened since then has a lot to do with Don King and his ilk. Heavy, 24-by-7 media coverage of sports tends to blow the warts up and put enormous scrutiny on a sport; look at the astounding level of coverage given the steroids issue in baseball, an issue that the media wouldn’t have even bothered to report 50 years ago, and which has far less impact on the on-field results than people tend to give it credit for.
Boxing is, unfortunately, dirtier than a dead pig. Matches are regularly fixed, from high level amateur bouts right up to big time prize fights. Even Olympic matches are a joke; U.S. boxers won a number of fights that were clearly on the take in the 1984 Olympics, and then went to Korea and were robbed in 1988, and then in 1992 everyone got scammed. It’s a joke.
The result has been to turn people away from boxing. Compared to football, baseball et al, boxing looks terrible; for all their problems the other pro sports are actually very cleanly run, in large part due to the gambling scares baseball had back in the 1910s. I have never heard anyone seriously suggest that a professional football, baseball, basketball or hockey game is fixed today, yet in boxing it’s par for the course.
3. No Organization
The world now has approximately 5,118 different boxing organizations, each of which will claim a different heavyweight champion depending on the most whimsical and arbitrary of rationales.
Let me ask you this; who, right now, is the world heavyweight champion? Don’t feel bad if you don’t know, because the truth is that nobody knows. You can’t know, because there is no champion. Every major boxing organization cites a different person:
The IBF says the champion is Chris Byrd. I’ve never heard of him either; he’s 35 years old and his manager is his Dad.
The WBA says it’s John Ruiz. Ruiz was recently beated my James Toney, but the match was later declared no contest when Toney tested positive for a banned substance. I assume it was Geritol because Toney must be like eighty years old now.
The WBC says it’s Vitali Klitschko, who we’ve all heard of. Umm, or maybe they say it’s Hasim Rahman. According to their web site Rahman is the “interim champion.”
The WBO, just to keep the streak alive, nominates Lamon Brewster, whose title win against Vladimir Klitschko was a model of stank-ass putridity.
You can’t get worked up about a heavyweight champ when there isn’t a heavyweight champ. The result of all this is that all power passes to the promoter; if the WBC insist you defend the title against a worthy contender, you just find the next Scrabble combination that hands out a shiny belt and negotiate a better deal.
Imagine, for a moment, how popular, say, professional baseball would be if it was like this. Today, with one Major League Baseball organization, one champion, games on the up and up, you get 75,000,000 fans a year and zillions more fan-games seen on TV.
Imagine now if the American and National League were not allied, hated each other, and refused to allow their champions to play each other for the overall title. Now imagine that in addition to the National and American League, you had a Federal League and a United States League, also claiming to be major leagues and having a bunch of the best players scattered around. Imagine also that each of the four leagues was set up so that the teams made up their own schedules. So this year the Red Sox refuse to play the Indians because the Indians are a young team who look like they can kick some ass, so the Red Sox avoid playing them and therefore the Indians can’t win the American League pennant. Meanwhile the Blue Jays and Orioles, sick of the big Yankee/Red Sox payrolls, started their own league, the North American League, and now the Blue Jays are 104-27 and claiming to be the real champion, while the Orioles switched over to the Federal League and just swept the New Jersey Smog Bombers, while the breakaway Oakland Athletics merged with the San Diego Padres and joined the USA League as the Vancouver Kodiaks but now the new San Diego Padres are fighting them in court for who gets to be the USA League West Champion. Regrettably, even this has been pushed to Page 2 of the sports section by allegations that the Los Angeles Dodgers - Mexico City Bandits game last Wednesday was fixed, and it’s kind of a big issue because one of them could win the NL West now that everyone on the Diamondbacks signed with the Japanese League and Arizona had to drop out of the majors entirely.
How many baseball fans do you think this would drive away? Well, this is what boxing fans have been putting up with.
Additionally, boxing stopped appearing on regular TV by the 80s. Once it switched to pay-per-view, it was only seen by existing fans. No new fans got to see the sport, even at a low level (the Friday Night Fights were one of TVs biggest draws in the 50s). As a kid, you weren’t likely to be seeing any boxing on TV. Now the fans are getting older, and there’s no new blood.
Very well said and insightful, RickJay, but I think you’re talking about a decline in boxing in general while the OP is questioning a decline in the heavyweights in particular. There are still many good household name draws in boxing whose matches generate some excitement, but it seems like every one of them is a middleweight or welterweight: Gatti, Mayweather, Jermaine Taylor, De la Hoya, Roy Jones Jr., Winky Wright, Shane Mosely, Zab Judah, and on and on. Name recognition among heavyweights right now, on the other hand, is as scarce as hen’s teeth. I think there’s just a lack of true heavyweight fighters ant the moment.
The heavyweight division has always been the premier event in boxing. There’s some good welterweights, lightweights et al around, but even the panache of those levels isn’t what it used to be. You just don’t see the attention paid to those guys as you used to see paid to the Hit Man, or Marvelous Marvin, or Sugar Ray Leonard.
Now, we may also, additionally, be in a low state of available heavyweights. Just part of the cycle. The last really good one was Lennox Lewis, I guess, after Mike Tyson imploded, and those around now who might be pretty good don’t have a lot of personality. So that may simply be an accident of timing.
I must admit that **RealityChuck ** had made an absolutely critical point I totally forgot. It’s every bit as im portant as the issues I cited. The importance of TV exposure for sport simply cannot be overstated; today it is the lifeblood of all sports. You know why football surpassed baseball as America’s favourite sport? TV.