I watched Ali-Spinks II live. Even my engineer-nerd dad was interested in this fight. I watched some Ray Leonard and Tommy Hearns, maybe even some Marvin Hagler.
I couldn’t name you a boxing champion at this point, and I never hear it mentioned. I do know students of mine who know the UFC champions, and I plan to watch the Lesnar-Velasquez fight this weekend. I know all the names and most of the histories of the UFC champs. I know why Matt Hughes carries a fan base after all this time. I know why Tito Ortiz is hated, along with Koscheck. I have a custom bumper sticker: "WWFD: What Would Fedor Do? That’s a joke, Christians. I’m one, too.
He’d go for the choke. And then thank God for the win.
I don’t know anyone who follows boxing. Literally. I know multiple people who can tell me who Lesnar is.
Is boxing closing in on being dead? I kind of hope so. It’s a limiting set of rules for no good reason. It’s even more brutal than current MMA rules. If you disagree, I suggest you read the current round times and fight stoppage rules for each sport. Plus, much of many MMA fights is spend in grappling, anyway.
MMA has indeed supplanted boxing in my heart of hearts. In boxing, fighters will clinch to give themselves an effective “time out”. No such thing in MMA: clinch and the REAL fun starts. (Pundits might bring up the “lay and pray” at this point, but it takes a heck of a lot more talent to take a fighter down and hold him in a dominating positition than it does to grab a guy who can’t counter because of the rules.) MMA is a multifaceted sport: good striking and takedown defense will counter wrestling, good jiujitsu will counter striking, good wrestling will counter jiujitsu. Conditioning AND explosiveness are huge physical factors, and the mental aspect of the game will often counter pure athleticism. It’s a great sport, and I’m only sorry that I’ll be missing UFC 121 Saturday whilst having dinner with my editor. Drat.
I still love boxing and always will, but corruption and poor management has hurt the sport greatly, and a lack of big name draws is causing the fan base to shrink. People slam Dana White a lot, but he’s done a great job at keeping the fights honest and interesting. Oh, and I hope Velasquez knocks out Lesnar in the first.
I’m more of a boxing fan, and probably always will be. I follow MMA from a distance and have a huge amount of respect for the athletes that practice it, but I prefer to see the total mastery of one discipline than the jack of all trades approach. At its best, boxing has a beauty and fluency that stands alone IMHO.
Boxing also has the phenomenon of chin. To witness the chin of an all time great like Hagler is something you just won’t, indeed can’t, ever see in MMA.
Whist the elite performers of MMA have made a big impact on the (American) public in recent years, Boxing is a much stronger sport overall. I don’t really see much quality in MMA once you penetrate a couple of levels down - you quickly arrive at the level of door men and local tough guys having a tear up.
Boxing is much more stratified, look past the elite level to international, then national and you’re still looking at accomplished athletes. I watched a fair bit of the commonwealth games boxing a few weeks back and even at the amateur level you can see great conditioned, skilled fighters.
Of course, boxing has a 100 year head start so it’s natural that this depth of ability is not there yet for MMA - and it may well develop. I’m just making the observation because there’s a lot more to any sport than what’s happening at the elite level.
C’mon man - I don’t mean to be antagonistic but that’s a completely fatuous observation.
I have always been a boxing fan . The heavyweights used to be interesting, but mismatches abound nowadays. But lighter divisions are still very good.
MMA does not compare. One grab of a leg and it is a slow and boring end. The fights are often big mismatches and a guy who brags like a professional wrestler gets his horn honked in 2 minutes or less. Hold a guy down defenseless and pound him in the face until the ref decides he has had enough. It is ugly. It is bottom basement sport.
I’m just the opposite. In fact, I was considering it last night as I was watching the Lessner v I Forget The Name of the Guy He Beat replay on Spike last night. I can’t watch boxing, because I keep thinking, “he’s wide open for a take down,” or “he should have popped him with an elbow.” And I can’t watch wrestling because I keep thinking, “chrissakes just punch him, dude.”
When one must be ready for anything (outside of the rules changes prohibiting the really nasty shit they used to do (hair pulling, groin pounding, etc) it makes for a much more exciting bout to watch.
I do like to see a little skill in the fighters, as opposed to a belly full of Jack and a bone of contention over the best time on the mechanical bull.
This isn’t true for the top tier of MMA athletes George St. Piere has been invited to try out for the Canadian wrestling team despite his only wrestling training coming from MMA. Most of the top fighters were All Americans in wrestling in College. It is much more likely to see a guy who is a total master at one aspect of the sport and then journeyman level at the others then it is to see a guy who’s just pretty good across the board.
Boxing has been dying out as a popular sport in the US for decades (and MMA isn’t taking its place – it’s nowhere near as big as boxing was in the 40s and 50s and will never get that way).
Lots of reasons: too many conflicting champions and sanctioning bodies, too many weight classes (prior to 1959, there were seven weight classes and never more than eight or nine champs (if there was some dispute); now there are 17, and probably about 25 champs minimum – harder to keep track of), few bouts on free TV/basic cable (in the 50s, it was on every Friday night; without the sport on TV, you don’t develop younger fans), no particularly interesting champions (the last was Mike Tyson), competition for fans from other sports, the etc.
Boxing is still successful as an international sport, but in the US, it’s dying a long, lingering death.
Boxing’s only hope is to centralize with a single all-powerful controlling body. They need a single commissioner and a single pathway to the top. One title belt and a pairing of all the redundancy. Eliminate the promoter in his current form and sign a series of TV contracts to move away from pay-per-view as a primary distribution avenue.
Part of boxings problem is it has been run by crooks for decades. The promoters have bought judges and set up mismatches to make money. I have seen Don King fighters win decisions that were absurd. His fighter got whipped all over the ring and won the decision, time after time.
I haven’t seen much MMA - maybe 4 fights - but I agree. I used to be a major boxing fan, when Tyson was on HBO every few months killing guys. Now, I only follow Pacquiao, because I work with a LOT of Philippinos.
Boxing is its own worst enemy. Corruption and splintered title sanctioning organizations were mentioned already. I’d argue that the weight classes work against American participation on a broad level. Light flyweight begins at 108 pounds. With American nutrition (or obesity) and athletic training standards being very different than they were 100 years ago when the classes started being defined, most American athletes aren’t even going to qualify for the first five or six divisions (which seem to be dominated by countries where people are either genetically or through malnutrition smaller, e.g. Mexico, Philippines). Then the highest class, heavyweight, is 200 lbs., when both Klitschkos are around 240.
Then, boxing antagonizes fans by stringing them out with matches no one really wants to see instead of making the handful of good matches happen. Maywether Pacquiao may never happen now because both camps wanted to milk a few more paydays out of mediocre lead-up fights.
Lack of depth in most divisions is another problem (and probably explains why so many over the hill fighters can keep getting matches – they’re bad, but not appreciably worse than the no-name younger guys).
Finally – MMA does have a potentially-deeper source of talent, in that many middle class parents who would not consider letting their kid box will be fine with letting him take up wrestling, Brazilian jiu jitsu, other martial arts. Even for poor black American kids, who historically often found boxing a potential way out of poverty, I’d say the focus is much more likely to be on basketball or football (which in any event are more accessible as your school will have teams, whereas you’d have to go out and find a gym or get recruited by Cus or the like to be a boxer).
The video begins with Goodrow complaining that he is not allowed to use his master strategy of biting and eye gouging. So the two fighters grab each other, fall to the ground, and hold each other in a loving embrace for 13 minutes. At that point, Goodrow employs his other master strategy: the ancient style of shove-my-foot-down-your-pants-and-strangle-your-junk-with-my-toes. I think it was originally developed by budhist monks.
I’m not sure which board game is homoerotic foot fetish crotch punishment (shoots and ladders maybe?), but I’m reasonably certain it ain’t chess.
I commented on modern MMA, which really came into existence sometime between 2000 - 2005 in the United States and Japan, and you reply with a Vale Tudo fight that took place in Brazil in 1997.
Even if I gave you a point for that under Calvinball rules, I could provide about 10 gajillion ripostes, so . . . what’s your point? Disgruntled boxing fan?
This is a prime example of why MMA will never reach the heights of popularity that were initially predicted by its meteoric rise – the ignorance of the casual fan (see above) is a HUGE obstacle. The casual fan likes haymakers, knockouts, and blood; fighters being blasted by head kicks; and occasionally (so long as it takes no longer than 30 seconds of grappling to execute) an exciting submission. The problem is that as fighters become more and more skilled and evenly matched, these sort of things do not happen often enough to hold the the short attention span of this type of fan.
If you are knowledgeable about jiu-jitsu and wrestling, a tactical ground battle is intensely interesting, even if there is no culminating submission. If you are knowledgeable about kickboxing or Muy Thai, watching how the fighters manage distance and choose their angles is fascinating, even without a knockout. But how many fans are this knowledgeable? Most fans are ignorant of the technical aspects of fighting – they just want to see wild bloody brawls.
As a result, there is a constant pressure on fighters to be exciting, even if it jeopardizes there chances of winning the fight. Talented and successful fighters with a reputation for being boring are less likely to receive title shots or see action on the main card. Georges St. Pierre, arguably the best pound for pound fighter in the sport, has been criticized for his cerebral game plans and reluctance to engage in slugfests. Even the rules of the sport are bent as referees are encouraged to stand fighters back up if the grappling action is lasting too long for the attention span of the drunken buffoons in the audience.
I think MMA is reaching the end of its initial explosion in popularity. Now that the fad is wearing off, casual fans are realizing that most fights do not end in highlight reel knockouts and are losing interest. While as a result of the spread of MMA based gyms and clubs, MMA has enough knowledgeable fans to sustain its existence, I cannot see MMA’s popularity ever eclipsing that of the traditional sports – football, basketball, etc.