Are we the last generation of boxing fans?

Well, if we are going back over twenty years (1990-2010) and off the top of my head...

Lewis
Benn
Eubank
Collins
Calzaghe
Hatton
Hamed
Froch
Haye

Of those, one is undoubtedly 'great' (Lennox), two are borderline great (Hamed, Calzaghe), one was a dominant lineal champ (Hatton) and another a unified champ at one weight and beltholder at another (Haye).

Then there are other 'champions' who weren't as good as that lot:

Ingle
Harrison
Cook
Arthur
Khan
Bruno
Hide
Macaranelli
Rees
Reid
Woodhall

Thats a hell of a lot of 'champions', even allowing for the proliferation of title belts nowadays, and certainly a lot more than 'two'.

MTF :dunno:

 

You've made that quite clear. And I've made it quite clear I'll comment on what I see fit. Mexican's having to pin their national hopes on a guy who makes Vargas look like Roy Jones jr since there's nobody else coming through is something I saw as worth noting.

 

Nah, I was talking last 10 years. Two outstanding champions - Hatton & Calzaghe. Maybe we can be generous and include Haye based on his cruiserweight work. Pretty similar output to the 90's, 80's, 70's, etc, basically. Asia has produced one genuinely great fighter.....etc, in line with the rest of my post.

 

Yes, and the fact that there are millions of fans who love a guy like that means that when someone comes along who can fight a bit better, there will be even more fans for him.

 

Right you are.:TLC:

 

No Honeyghan?

 

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Lou Dibella........

 

In my opinion Lou is a very good example of how most Americans are convinced that the world circulates around their ass.

The BBC commentator has it down better.....the US picture is bleaker than it is elsewhere.

Daniel Jacobs and Victor Ortiz being beaten is not proof that boxing is in decline....it's just proof that other people are out there, like Maidana the Argentinian, like Pirog the Russian, who are prepared to roll the dice and take their own chances.

I always remember that scene in NCFOM where Ed Tom Bell {Tommy lee Jones} father tells him that "it ain't all waiting on us"

It ain't all about the USA. Other people exist and other people want to make their mark on the world.

 

The losses of Jacobs and Ortiz were brought up to show the failings of Golden Boy as a promoter in developing fighters (as the person raised the age of Arum and King).

Ortiz and Jacobs are 23...about the same age Vicente Escobedo was when he last to Jimenez.

If Golden Boy can't develop their prospects - and they sign a ton of them - then their stewarship of some of the sports' prospects has to be considered lacking...and that's a problem for the entire sport, not just for Golden Boy.

 

Precisely my point. Golden Boy is just an American issue. It's not even a real American issue, dependent as it is on HBO. Just how the travails of HBO, or Golden Fall Guy etc can be translated into constituting a grander global problem is beyond me.

Personally, and I've annoyed some people by saying this, the fact that Americans are losing to non-Americans is not a sign that the game is in a bad state.

Remember, it is a good 14 years now since Golota went and did things to Riddick Bowe. Nobody said boxing was in decline the night that the Bowe mob tore MSG apart.

 

Well, first of all, Golden Boy doesn't just sign prospects from the US, or even just from North America.

Secondly, if their prospects aren't developing into world class fighters and/or gate attractions that can draw good television ratings (and therefore good television money), then that means there's less money available to potential opponents, whether they're based in the US, Britain, Germany, or wherever.

As an example, the fact that there aren't a lot of top American heavyweights right now does in fact impact the Klitschko brothers.

Mayweather-Pacquiao is the biggest fight not to be made this year...but Klitschko-Haye might be the second biggest in that category...which wouldn't mean as much, if there were other top draws available.

But if HBO doesn't want to televise the Klitschko's unless they're in against two former sub-heavyweight division fighters (Haye and Adamek) that means fewer big fights for them, and for fans...not just fans in the US, but fans worldwide.

And yeah, you can point out that the Klitschko's still make good money fighting in Germany, and maybe the interest in them remains in Germany no matter who they fight, but that's not the case in every other country, and while the Klitschko can still make money fighting in Germany, they were still upset when HBO pulled out television slot and $250,000 check (or whatever it was) to televised Klitschko-Peter.

If boxing budgets of Showtime and HBO are being cut, that's not just an American problem, they don't just televised American fighters.

 

Speaking of Lou Dibella talking about the problems of boxing and contemplating leaving boxing...I thought this was a pretty funny excerpt from Steve Kim last week.

http://www.maxboxing.com/news/sub-lead/so-is-a-tulip-worth-more-than-a-berto

 

Boxing does revolve around America. It's a sport of the America's. I'm not sure why that simple truth offends you so much. It's a dirty, base, sleazy sport and it needs a wretched corrupt setting & embellishment by the cheap thrill of knowing that fast living, drug addict pole dancers are right on the other side of the vomitory doors.

'Next saturday live from Aliandez Arena, Mikel Kessler vs Felix Sturm for the Undisputed Super Middle weight championship of the world! Announced by some dull, podgy Bavarian guy in front of a silent crowd, sprinkled with German day time TV celebrities. All arriving in perfect comfort on the cities impeccable public transport network, cleanly fuelled by the newly harnessed power of civic respect. Pay per View £19.99.'

It's sexless. I just can't get an erection tuning into that, Irish. A future where that's what the apex boxing event looks like is a boxing future Im not interested in. Great fighters and great boxing events just aren't produced in civilized places like Germany.

Jacobs & Ortiz fucking suck. Them getting beat isn't the sign of boxings decline, obviously, it's that that's all America is producing. The rest of the world isn't doing better, the place where 90% of great fighters come from has just totally dried up. This is simple stuff, stop being so deliberately stupid about it in a clever attempt to make it fit this thing you do....

 

Not entirely true. It used to revolve around America. It is not a sport "of the America's". It is a world-wide sport, with the two best fighters on the planet being drawn from the USA and The Philippines at present. And there are Americans hard at work in China trying to recruit Chinese fighters for the developing Chinese TV market. What you just said is like saying Soccer is English. And that therefore the best players will always be English. What is happening in boxing is what happened in Soccer 100 years ago. The comfortable, cartelised little world of boxing has been shaken up.

Once again, your inability to stay within the rubric of the original posited question is quite striking. Even assuming that there are no memorable fights or fighters in Germany, and even assuming that the experience is tepid {both of which are subjective issues} the original question pertains to fans.

Well, you could have come up with a better example than some tee-total confabulation. Is it not telling that the game in Germany produces so many instances of pure boredom that you have to fabricate one for the point in question.

Patsy Palmer is a daytime TV whore. Regina Halmich is a professional boxer. Arthur Abraham is a professional boxer. These people also attend Klitschko shows. You know who I spotted in the crowd at Ricky Burns fight? George Galloway.:shit::shit::shit:

I'll never forget Frank Maloney's little attack on the Klitschko's. The weekend after he attacked boxing in Germany, calling the Germans a "boring race"....Darren Sutherland, who was under Maloney's supervision, hung himself in his London apartment. And his fighter John McDermott got robbed in an English Heavyweight Title fight {:laugh11:} against Tyson Fury. People like Maloney are wallowing in the faeces of the fight game and cannot cater to their own business for taking time off to talk about a problem that doesn't exist.

Who said it was the future? It is merely the present. And presently, the Germans are cultivating young fighters, promoting them, regulating them, keeping close tabs on shits like Ahmet Ohner and forcing him to do his dirty in Spain etc. Personally i think there is an element of begrudgery at work.

Maybe you prefer Patsy Palmer and Dirty Den down at the MEN for Benn vs McClellan, or Rolex Ray and Stilks and Lenny the Guvnor for the Richie Wenton vs James Murray fight.

Horses for Courses. Nobody is saying that you need enjoy the seeting, fire-regulation-breaking headiness of a fight in Indonesia or Thailand, or the gentility and techno-brilliance of Vitali's entrance for the Sam Peter fight. If the Americans could put their bigotry to one side for a moment and just show the fucking fights then they could take the play away from Germany. After all, what do they have to compete with it? Cheato vs Pacman?

The issue pertains to fans. The very fact that you are complaining about 45,000 German fans makes me think that, no, we are not the last generation of boxing fans, nor anywhere near to being the last generation. Boxing is one of the few sports that thrives off the present-tense more than any other sport. If you have fans and champions today you will definitely have them tomorrow.

How anyone in their right mind could argue that the globalization of the sport of boxing was harmful to it is beyond me. Different people do different types of shows. That doesn't harm boxing at all.

Most 18th century dandy's duelled. They duelled with poncery and silk shirts. And one of them ended up dead, usually. A smash to the face is a smash to the face REGARDLESS of the sort of people watching.

 

More like saying 'football is a sport of Europe and South America'. It is and I bet it always will be. If and when those two regions dry up the sport will free fall within a couple of decades.

Again, the cartelised world of boxing is being shaken up by the decline of it's major sporting wealth generator, not by the rise of others.

For fuck sake, irish, can't you see the obvious connection? We pay to watch boxing because of fighters. In time, in a long enough period of time without any great fighters & really exciting fights to generate public excitement & talk the fan base will continue to dry up. I am not straying from the original question, Im expanding on it...in a screamingly obvious way. The two things are connected.

Relating to the rest of your post, I explained in post 40 what I think the dynamic is with the local & regional success of guys like Froch, Wlad, & others and I stand by it. These guys are simply not global stars, they're carefully built local/regional celebrities and such a model will not sustain boxing long term.

Maybe you'd rather I shoe horned some ethno-cultural commentary into my boxing posts. Apparently that's more relevant to the rise or decline of boxing than the production of great boxers.:TLC:

 

Come on. The fall of the Roman Empire gave rise to new Empires. Everyone is mooting Africa or the USA to produce a dominant soccer team in the next few years. I don't think it will happen, not because they don't have the talent, but because the European and South American scenes have not become ossified and obsolete like the Yankee boxing scene. You must understand that America, like Rome, has rested on it's laurels....as others have themselves come on in leaps and bounds.

That's only half the story. When Marciano was Champion, Germany and the USSR and much of Europe were coming off the wrong end of a World War. That's a reality. America has had 50 yeas of doing things her own way in the absence of any real competition. I think somewhere along the line that people are going to accept that there is a relationship between these factors.

But the fan base is not drying up. In America, maybe. But that's only the American fan base.

That's just what Rocky Marciano was. A local celebrity. He was known in America and the UK. Maybe a few enlightened Krauts took the time to notice him, when they weren't foraging for food stamps or petrol rations. You think anyone in 80's England was au-fait with Larry Holmes or Mike Spinks? The reality is that many of the fighters whom people are trying to retrospectively install as Global Icons were in fact themselves little more than American hero's unknown to the rest of the world. Riddick Bowe is not known in Europe, like say Ali or Tyson is. Lennox Lewis was fucking hated for years in America, they didn't even regard him as a proper fighter.

If you examine the flag-smilie you will see that the flag-stick is broken.

 

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Here is the other side of the argument- how the real fans get ignored and dissed.

 

We could go round and round on this. Partly because we're fixated different things and talking past each other. Let's just decide you're right, it's a less depressing perspective.