Whatever happened to the sport of boxing?

 

Now for something completely different. If you are of a certain age—meaning you were alive and conscious during the 20^th century—you might recall that the sport of boxing actually was of some public interest, and most people actually knew the names of prominent actors in the sport and there was excitement around fights that featured the champ and top contenders or former champions. There are plenty of classic battles of the past to be found for your viewing pleasure on YouTube; one example is in regard to what people may have forgotten: that after his stunning loss to Muhammad Ali, George Forman came back to knock out Joe Frazier a second time, and then there was the slugfest with Ron Lyle where in the fourth round both fighters took turns being knocked down and looking one punch away from being finished, but each somehow got up off the mat to survive; here, unlike in the Ali fight, the bell saved Foreman…

 

… allowing him to knock out Lyle cold in the fifth round…

 

…like he would later leave Gerry Cooney:

 

I remember that the Foreman-Cooney fight was such a big deal that during a night-shift job, everyone was talking about who they thought would win, and then someone called home and announced excitedly that he was told that Foreman knocked out Cooney “unconscious” in the second round (Cooney—once the “Great White Hope”—fought more like a “preacher” than a “puncher”). Yeah, those were the days. In fact, the heavyweight champion in particular was widely known throughout the world; the fact that champion was usually an American maintained the interest of the U.S. public.

In the pre-pay-per-view era, many fights between champions and contenders were aired even in the afternoon on network television. The Foreman-Lyle fight was an “exclusive” broadcast on ABC’s “Wide World of Sports.” The first boxing match that I can remember watching as a child was a primetime network telecast between some guy who was derisively referred to in some quarters as Cassius Clay, and some white dude. The fight didn’t last long, because the white dude’s face was transformed into a bloody pulp and the referee stopped the fight. 

 

 

With some historical perspective I now know that this particular fight was “significant”: it was Muhammad Ali’s first sanctioned fight in the U.S. since he was stripped of his title and license to box three years prior for refusing induction in the Army, presumably to serve in Vietnam. Ali claimed a religious exemption because of his recently acquired Muslim faith. His opponent that night was Jerry Quarry, and after the fight Ali confessed he tried to hold back on further pummeling on Quarry because he wanted to show his appreciation for him agreeing to participate in this fight.

That was the thing about boxing back then; in the lead up to a big match there always seemed to be was some theatrical storyline or personal drama, and the bigger the names the bigger was the hype that preceded it. It certainly wasn’t a “pretty” sport, with the goal to knock an opponent senseless for at least ten seconds, or at least look better for more rounds short of that. But there was something elemental about “combat” between two mortals inside a ring to decide who would be the “last man standing.” Unlike martial arts or wrestling, the goal was about life itself.

But things have changed, and you have to be a boxing fanatic these days to know who the “champion” is any weight class is. Things used to be a lot simpler, when there were only eight weight classes and one sanctioning body awarding a belt. According to ESPN’s current boxing champions list, there are 17 weight classes and four different belts, meaning that there could potentially be 68 different “champions.” In only three weight classes are all four belts held by one fighter: Super Middleweight (Canelo Alvarez), Junior Middleweight (Jermell Charlo) and Lightweight (Devin Haney). In the Cruiserweight, Junior Bantamweight, Flyweight and Junior Flyweight (those last three really are scraping the bottom of the barrel) divisions each of the four belts is held by four different “champions.” All told, there are currently 43 “champions” holding the 68 belts, although Charlo also holds the WBC Middleweight belt.

Do I care about the sport anymore? Nope, I haven’t been following boxing much at all in the current century. Fighters in the middle-weights, like Oscar De La Hoya, Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao seemed to be the only “big names” that casual boxing fan knew or cared about, and now they’re gone. Remember when the “biggest” name in the sports world was the current heavyweight boxing champ? The last “big name” to hold the title was Lennox Lewis, and now? Well, alright, I’ve at least heard of Tyson Fury who currently holds the WBC belt, but not because of any of his fights, but because of the circus act that surrounds him.

The IBF, WBO and IBO belts (whatever) are held by some joker named Oleksandr Usyk, who like former champ Wladimir Klitschko, is Ukrainian. Usyk won his first belt in the Cruiserweight class in just his fifth professional fight (some “competition”), before moving up a weight class and winning the heavyweight title in his 18^th fight. He is a bit of joke because he’s only fought one fight a year since 2018, so that tells you something either about the “competition,” the lax requirements of holding the belts, and the fact that the best fighters in a weight class avoid fighting each other like the plague.

That latter is a huge problem for selling boxing to the public, but there are other reasons. The “big fights” are all now on PPV, and that limits the audience. Boxers don’t have the “personality” or “charisma” as they used to; at least even fighters in the past who were not “loquacious” at least “spoke” with their reputations in the ring. The physical wear-and-tear (especially when it leads to brain damage) and a society more “sensitive” to violence of any kind has also led to the decline of boxing as a major sporting spectacle in which the “best” athletes participate. Today, the top draws may be aging fighters for the sake of nostalgia, or “celebrity” fights that make a joke of the sport.

Some have suggested a way to make boxing more “relevant” is to reduce the number of weight classes by half, and reducing the number of sanctioning bodies back to two or even one, to force the best fighters to fight each other instead of “protecting” one of the four current belts in each weight class. Champions should be forced to defend their titles more than once a year or two. This might persuade real athletes to get back into the sport, which seems dominated by foreign fighters who are more in shape than their American competitors, at least in the heavyweight class. Foreman certainly looked more like the Pillsbury Doughboy in the 1990s, but there was no doubt he still had a terrific punch, and today fighters in the upper-classes just seem to want to avoid “hurting” each other too much. I don’t know if that should be called cowardice or not.

I don’t know. Maybe the inevitable “downfall” of boxing really began when Buster Douglas knocked out Mike Tyson and the “mystique” of the sport suddenly evaporated. Tyson was mostly a fraud after that, spending time in prison after being accused of raping some beauty queen who willingly had an encounter with him (but felt he treated her “disrespectfully” on second thought). Then there was the ear-munching incident in the fight with Evander Holyfield, and boxing just became a source of disdain for many people. Before Tyson’s reign, it was once again the middleweight divisions with the likes of Leonard, Hagler and Duran which maintained interest in the sport until a “charismatic” heavyweight champion emerged, but today we don’t even have that—or anything.