It’s been a long time since I’ve followed the sport of boxing. I do recall a time when the fight game had such cultural significance that celebrities actually got into the “action,” such as when actor Burt Lancaster did color commentary for the first Ali-Frazier fight, as did David Frost in the “Rumble in the Jungle” Ali-Forman fight. Those were the days when you often saw bouts featuring the top names in the sport on network television. The first boxing “event” I have memory of was Muhammad Ali’s return to the ring against Jerry Quarry, and it was a major prime time extravaganza; I recall that the fight didn’t last long, and at the end of it Quarry’s face looked like somebody had thrown a bucket of red paint into it. I also remember the fight that Ken Norton broke Ali’s jaw. Although the “big” fights were usually aired on closed-circuit television, because there was no cable television to compete with (the UHF channels had the “non-network” programming), network television was still a viable source of revenue for promoters. Thus the top fighters had significant exposure to the public, and fighters like Ali certainly had personalities that were prime time ready; his opponents might have rather less charisma or seem slow-witted, but given Ali’s controversial persona that didn't fear to question the prevailing political and social mores of the day which you either loved or loathed, even these fighters served as a suitable counterpoint that made any fight with Ali subject to passionate, contradictory emotions. The fight game’s essence—the primal struggle between two individuals, often with back stories that involved poverty, ethnic identity and overcoming adversity—was also the stuff of theater; not for nothing does it seem that almost all of the best sports films deal with boxing.
But beginning in the 1980s (naturally, everything started going downhill after Reagan took office), cable television and pay-per-view made the top fighters more remote from the public. But first we had Larry Holmes putting people to sleep, although the Leonard, Hearns, Durán and Hagler foursome still managed to provide plenty of drama to keep fight fans interested, at least for awhile. For a brief three years, Mike Tyson—he of the little boy “charm” and fists of concrete—rescued the heavyweight division, becoming a media darling and public curiosity. That is until Don King, the manipulative Robin Givens and her mother came into his life, the former allowing Tyson’s life to fall into disorder, while the latter two made a muddle of Tyson’s immature emotions. The shocking loss to Buster Douglas (who “reign” as champion lasted only until his very next fight), followed by his rape conviction completed Tyson’s fall from grace; his “comeback” was tarnished from the start, and with the Evander Holyfield ear-cannibalism incident, the heavyweight division was now officially discredited. Last year, Paul Beston wrote about the “Ghost Sport,” in which
“Tyson’s behavior sullied boxing’s always precarious reputation, making the sport synonymous with freakishness. He would be the last in a long line of heavyweights to bear a symbolic connection to American social trends. For just as the blustery John L. Sullivan represented a growing nation coming into its strength, and the magnetic Dempsey the birth of mass-media celebrity and commercial culture, and the stoic Louis the hard years of depression and war, and the mercurial Ali the age of rebellion and change, so Tyson embodied the postmodern hoodlum—the gangsta from an urban landscape pulverized by fatherlessness and anomie.”
The fight game is now a “niche” sport at best; ESPN rarely reports anything at all about boxing unless it has to. Today you have boring Russians with zero personality dominating the heavyweight division who rarely fight in this country—and whose opponents are usually overweight no-names, wearing ridiculous shorts that hang over their knees, and whose best “moves” are made by their flopping belly fat. The sport also has far too many alphabet soup organizations who give out their own phony championship belts, causing uncertainty and confusion which has especially hurt the heavyweight division.
Still, observers like Breston thought that Manny Pacquiao was the kind of fighter who could save boxing from itself; Pacquiao was, like Ali, someone who embraced life beyond the ring. He was a national hero in his native Philippines, was active in politics and social causes. But this is not enough to bring credibility back to fight game; Floyd Mayweather, currently in jail on a domestic violence conviction, has mocked a sport where fighters like Ali would never shame themselves by avoiding fights with their top challenger for fear they might lose. It also hasn’t helped that the outcomes of the Mayweather-Victor Ortiz and Pacquiao-Juan Marquez fights have left fans frustrated with incredulity and a sense of being “cheated” by crooked fixers.
And now anger and frustration over Timothy Bradley’s incomprehensible split-decision victory over Pacquiao this past Saturday threatens to destroy whatever micron of relevance boxing still has. Viewers across the nation were stunned by a decision apparently made by ringside judges who mistook who was fighting who; few observers had Bradley winning more than two rounds, and fight statistics showed that Pacquiao clearly dominated the action. Bradley’s record of 28-0 with only 12 knockouts suggested a nothing more than competent opponent who was just this much better than the has-beens and stiffs he fought up to this point. The judges’ scoring was so far removed from reality that it brought back memories of the bad old times when corruption was the principle moral “principal.” But this time it was not crime bosses and fighters who fixed fights and took dives, it was the judges. At “best,” some people suspected that the judges, mindful of the controversial decision in favor of Pacquiao over Marquez, decided that Pacquiao had to win a round “decisively” with no doubts in order to award him the point; at worst, the judges were unduly “influenced” by outside forces who bet heavily against Pacquiao, who after the Marquez fight and seeming lack of focus appeared ripe for defeat. Another conspiracy theory is that the fight was “fixed” to set-up an already planned—and more lucrative—rematch. One thing is for certain: Boxing did not need another knockout blow to its credibility—which only promises to make it even more irrelevant than it already is.
People are now fond of saying that mixed martial arts is the new “boxing.” To me, it is like (real) wrestling, just as dull except that you have hitting and kicking; an MMA fight is as amateurish as a couple of dudes getting into a back alley scrum. There is no “sweet science” to it, just a jumble of incompatible moves that give me a headache; it just looks made-up. Anyone who thinks this stuff compares to the classic battles between Ali and Frazier simply have no sense of style, or history. But if boxing allows MMA to replace it, it only has itself to blame.
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