Some mainstream looks at the sport of boxing

Mitchell Kane · Aug 4, 2008

I'm not sure if anyone will find these articles interesting or not, or even read the.

Just figured I'd post them after I read them.

This is from the New York Times.

What Happened To Boxingâ€™s Golden Age? A Freakonomics Quorum
By Annika Mengisen

Bruce Silverglade at Gleasonâ€™s Gym, Brooklyn, NY
Sports fan or not, chances are youâ€™ve heard of Sugar Ray Robinson, George Foreman, and Rocky Marciano.
But unless you follow boxing, you probably havenâ€™t heard of Antonio Margarito, who recently beat Miguel Cotto to become a three-time welterweight champion.
This disparity may explain why boxing isnâ€™t as popular as other U.S. sports today, writes East Side Boxingâ€™s Aaron King:
â€¦ [a friend of mine] loves all sports, including boxing â€¦ I asked him why he didnâ€™t enjoy the sport as much as he did others, and he gave me a short response. â€œI donâ€™t see the fighters on SportsCenter.â€
So why arenâ€™t we hearing boxersâ€™ names alongside the likes of Brett Favre and Leon Powe?
We gathered a group of people who fight and/or know the sport well â€” Bob Margolis, Bruce Silverglade, Kasia Boddy, and Andre Henry â€” and asked them the following questions:
Will boxing ever again see a golden age in popularity, comparable to football and baseball today?
Why are the 1920â€™s often referred to as a golden age for the sport?
Why is modern-day boxing compared to horse racing?
(The two were often legalized together.)
Here are their responses. Feel free to share your theories as well.
Bruce Silverglade, president of Gleasonâ€™s Gym, Brooklyn (former training headquarters for Muhammad Ali), former president of the Metropolitan Amateur Boxing Federation and chairman of the National Junior Olympic Committee, matchmaker, promoter, and booking agent.
â€œSince we are changing from one group of athletes (blacks) to others (Hispanics and Eastern Europeans), we are on down time. When the transition is complete the chances are better that the superstar will be there.â€
I know that everything goes in cycles. There will be another golden age just because it will happen.
Boxing is still popular in the United States though we have slipped from the levels of the past. This is due to competition from other sports. When there was a smaller baseball season and a smaller football season and no other major sport, boxing ruled. Now that the major sports have expanded and a huge variety of other sports are available for viewing, boxing is getting squeezed out.
The nature of boxing prohibits it from being like other sports. A boxer only fights once, twice, or maybe three times a year. Their audience canâ€™t match the audience of the N.Y. Yankees that play 162 times a year. However, when the exciting boxer has a date, he garners a huge one night audience. The statistics for Pay-Per-View bear this out. The largest audiences for any PPV shows are always boxing.
We are getting many Eastern Europeans into the sport. They are the latest group of immigrants. Some are talented and if one or two superstars emerge the golden age will be here.
The thing that excites the public is talent. If a boxer is talented, he is exciting and people want to follow him. Half the people love him and want him to win and half the people hate him and want him to lose. But they all watch and follow his career. There is always a possibility for a superstar. You can not predict when he will arrive. Since we are changing from one group of athletes (blacks) to others (Hispanics and Eastern Europeans), we are on down time. When the transition is complete the chances are better that the superstar will be there.
Marketing always helps. But it really comes down to the boxer. If the boxer has talent and is exciting the marketing will spread the word. If the boxer is not talented and exciting the people will not continue to tune in.
Boxing can be seen on TV seven nights a week, 52 weeks a year. That isnâ€™t too bad.
Boxing has several parts to it: Professional, which has some excitement and is on TV all the time, amateur, which is exciting but has very little viewership (there will be coverage of boxing in the Olympics), and recreational boxing which is bursting at the seams. Every gym in America today offers boxing classes. This growth in popularity has happened over the past 15 years.
The golden age of boxing that you refer to in your question, 1920, is only one of many golden ages. The late 1700â€™s produced a golden age in America when the European (especially English) boxers brought the sport to our shores. The mid and later 1800â€™s had a tremendous amount of boxing all across America. Since the 1960â€™s we have had the Muhammad Ali era, The Sugar Ray Leonard era, and the Mike Tyson era. Yes, the 1920â€™s was an exciting time for boxing with the great influx of immigrants to The United States. The era produced more Jewish champions than any other sport. The Irish and Italians also excelled.
In conclusion, I would like to state that boxing will be around long after the other sports are done away with. When there were the first three men on earth, two of them got into a fight and the third cheered them on. The same thing will happen when there are only three men left on earth again.
I have heard the sport of boxing being compared to the sport of horse racing. This reference is not especially directed at modern-day boxing. Usually the reference has to do with the boxer being treated like a horse.
The boxer, usually, has very little to say about when he fights, who he fights, how often he fights, how much he will earn per fight, or anything else about his career. Also, like a horse, anything can happen on a given day â€¦ I think this type of comparison is disrespectful to the boxer.
Andre Henry, the 2007 141 lb. Open NY Metro Champion and 141 lb. Open Silver Gloves winner in the Daily News Golden Gloves, a first degree black belt in a hybrid kick boxing style, and a black belt in Judo and Ju Jitsu.
â€œThe only way we can increase the popularity of boxing is to take small steps and inform one person at a time.â€
I donâ€™t believe that boxing will ever be able to compare in popularity to baseball or football. America was built on these sports â€” even soccer has a hard time competing. as far as boxing is concerned, we have to first try to open the eyes of people who are against boxing.
To some boxing is a sport thatâ€™s too barbaric and should be banned from television; where I can personally say that boxing has saved my life and turned my life around completely.
Boxing is a sport where two athletes are trying to out think each other like a game of chess, trying hard to set the other person up for checkmate.
In chess we use pawns and various other pieces to control the middle of the board. In boxing we use our jab along with other punches to control the tempo of the match. When you look outside the box and look at the bigger picture, boxing is a sport that brings out the best in an individual in all aspects of their life.
The only way we can increase the popularity of boxing is to take small steps and inform one person at a time. Unfortunately good news doesnâ€™t spread as quickly as bad news.

Image from Boxing: A Cultural History, Advertisement for â€œTV Fights,â€ The Ring, February 1955
Kasia Boddy, English teacher at University College, London and author of Boxing: A Cultural History.
â€œThe myth of a golden age requires a consensus about what and who matter. Within boxing, there is no such consensus.â€
The 1920â€™s were referred to as a golden age of sport in general, and of boxing in particular after the twenties were over. In other words, the idea of golden ages is inevitably a nostalgic one.
There have been golden ages of boxing since the 3rd century A.D. when Philostratus looked back to the good old days before â€œthe energetic became sluggards, the hardened became weak, and Sicilian gluttony gained the upper hand.â€ In the 1950â€™s, The New Yorkerâ€™s A.J. Liebling wrote wistfully that the arrival of televised boxing marked the end of a â€œheroic cycleâ€ (which he located in the 1930â€™s and 40â€™s). Today the period most keenly remembered is that of the late 1960â€™s and early 70â€™s, a time dominated by Muhammad Ali; a time, as one documentary put it, â€œwhen we were kings.â€ The [era of the] late 70â€™s and early 80â€™s is another candidate for some.
Yet certain factors mark out the 1920â€™s. The major difference between boxing before 1920 and afterwards was that it became legal, and once legal it could become big business.
At the heart of the business was Madison Square Garden, which, in close partnership with the Hearst Corporation, made boxing fashionable. The sports pages of national newspapers were first introduced by Hearst in 1895; by 1929, research by the American Society of Newspaper Editors revealed, one out of four readers bought a paper for the sports page. The editors voted Jack Dempsey the â€œgreatest stimulation to circulation in 20 years.â€
Boxing also benefited from the development of radio into a mass medium. The first title fight to be broadcast live was the 1921 Dempsey-Carpentier fight â€” the first million-dollar gate but also a calculated mismatch. And this was not the only respect in which 20â€™s boxing was merely gold-plated. The moment Dempsey won his title in 1919 he announced that he would â€œdraw the color line.â€ There was no money to be had in matching Dempsey against black opponents such as Harry Wills who might have actually beat him.
Will boxing ever again see a golden age ?
I donâ€™t think so.
Today itâ€™s hard to think of any sport in terms of golden ages. The myth of a golden age requires a consensus about what and who matter. Within boxing, there is no such consensus.
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Mitchell Kane · Aug 4, 2008

Continued:

The television era has seen the proliferation of governing bodies and â€œAlphabet Titles.â€ Only a limited constituency of hard-core boxing fans care to keep track. More generally, boxing now competes in an over-crowded sports market. No single sport or sportsman can lay claim to the kind of fame possible in the 20â€™s.
Boxing and horse racing developed in parallel in 18th-century England. Both appealed to wealthy aristocrats who liked to gamble. With large bets came the need for rules. In boxing, these first came in 1743; after 1746, gamblers adopted the notion of horse handicapping and began to divide boxers into weight categories.
Bob Margolis, content manager at Thomson-Reuters and jazz guitarist who has trained for boxing at Gleasonâ€™s Gym in Brooklyn for 18 months.
â€œI wonder if the American audience in this current day and age wants to deal with something as raw as the sweet science.â€
Considering the intermixing of corporate America and football and baseball, [boxing] reaching their level of popularity is like a third party gaining the presidency!
When the sport becomes regulated and the point system changed, then it has a shot. By rarely having one â€œundisputedâ€ champion in a given weight class, the titles awarded become meaningless.
Why not regulate the types of gloves used and other external factors that can influence a fighter or the fightâ€™s outcome? Itâ€™s not that different from seeing what happens when the free market runs unwatched â€” a mess which hurts many. So imagine what goes on in a sport as violent and on the edge as boxing. How many fighters need to be hospitalized after a 12 round fight?
The amateur game is relatively safe compared to football, but also soccer! So, if the idea that a jab counts as much as a powerful shot, then the strategy, movement, and nuanced maneuvering which make the sport so beautiful will be revealed.
Itâ€™s also a brutally honest sport despite the presence of pageantry. I wonder if the American audience in this current day and age wants to deal with something as raw as the sweet science. Like jazz music, what seems straightforward, easily understood, and mastered is, well, not.
Regarding the idea of the 1920â€™s and 30â€™s as boxingâ€™s golden age? I suppose when Jack Dempsey was on the scene that couldnâ€™t hurt. Maybe Joyce Carol Oates went overboard when she called him the â€œvery embodiment of hunger, rage, the will to do hurt; the spirit of the Western frontier come East to win his fortune.â€
But she has a point: in a way, boxing might have been an extension of Frederick Jackson Turnerâ€™s frontier theses from the late 1800â€™s. This was also the time of classic liberalism which placed the emphasis on the individual, not the collective. So what better example than boxing?
Besides the obvious betting angle, I would think there is a crossover of fight fans and those who go to the track. But also both sports are forever linked to corruption and all sorts of dirty activity, which probably increases their popularity.
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Mitchell Kane · Aug 4, 2008

From Scoop Jackson at ESPN.com.

Boxing's black eye

By Scoop Jackson
Page 2

The race-related talk for the last few years has been all about baseball. So many concerns, so little activity, so waiting on results.

The decline of the black ballplayer seems to be the new epidemic: The sport that changed racial relations and acceptance in America has an African-American population of around 8 percent, less than half of what it was in 1997 (17 percent).

But with all the concern about the lack of blacks in baseball, another plague has slipped under the race radar in sports.

If you think baseball has a black problem, start looking at boxing.

How far has boxing fallen? James Toney and Hasim Rahman fought recently ... on a Wednesday.

Ever since Jack Johnson, boxing has been the sport that has had a more intimate relationship with black folks than high blood pressure and gators. To a greater degree than baseball -- greater than basketball! -- boxing has been the sport in which black athletes have found dominance.

Joe Louis, Henry Armstrong, Sugar Ray Robinson, Muhammad Ali, Sugar Ray Leonard, Marvin Hagler, Mike Tyson. For almost 100 years -- from generation to generation, weight class to weight class -- black boxers set a standard of excellence matched in length and impact only by track and field. But today, 100 years since Johnson became the first black to win the heavyweight title, finding a black man (in any weight class) who holds or is even challenging for a significant belt or title has become as impossible as Manny Pacquiao's finding a decent challenger in the ring. Go down the list; go find any mythical and objective list of the current pound-for-pound best in boxing; go discover how, unlike in baseball, the black man in boxing has reached a level of near extinction.

Now that Floyd Mayweather Jr. has announced his retirement, who's left? Name one African-American boxer who is in contention to carry both a belt and a race through this dire situation. Or just name one black boxer for whom you'd shell out top PPV money on Saturday night to watch him fight. Try. Name just one.

Before the Miguel Cotto-Antonio Margarito classic last week, ESPN boxing analyst Dan Rafael put out the very-close-to-definitive breakdown of the world's best boxers, regardless of weight class. Only four black boxers were in the top 20, and just one was in the top 10. And that one was Bernard Hopkins, who has become a boxing version of Brett Favre.

Shane Mosley, Jermain Taylor, Nate Campbell, Zab Judah, James Toney, Samuel Peter, Hasim Rahman â€¦ anyone after that would be a desperate attempt to make a point. The epoch of blacks ruling boxing is over. How low can it go? It's already there. Toney and Rahman, two of the top black boxers in the world in any weight class (both are heavyweights), recently fought each other in a marquee matchup â€¦ on a Wednesday!

In baseball, there are reasons the decline of black involvement is so severe. Lack of inner-city programs. Little grassroots involvement from Major League Baseball. The influx of Latino and Dominican players taking up roster spots. Too time-consuming at the little league level. Generations of absentee black fathers who don't pass on the game to their sons and nephews. The popularity of video games and other sports. Young black athletes no longer having the patience and failing to see the instant financial windfall associated with football and basketball. Chicks don't dig the long ball as much. The game just isn't cool anymore. But what's boxing's excuse? Where do its variables lie? Beating someone's behind always has been a celebrated pastime in African-American culture. Learning how to beat someone's behind and make millions doing it always has been a form of escape; an outlet for our journeys of poverty and struggle -- like Floyd Patterson, like Rubin Carter, like Roy Jones Jr. -- that many of us were born into.

Boxing has been "our" sport more than any other. It's become a singular part of our heritage. It's been the black man's best girl.

And now that girl is gone. The hopes of any semblance of a return to a limited glory rest inside the gloves of flyweight Rau'Shee Warren and welterweight Demetrius Andrade. (Both are favored to win gold in the Beijing Olympics.) Outside of that â€¦ there is no outside of that.

HBO Boxing analyst Jim Lampley sees the situation differently. "Boxing is a dramatically globalized sport. There are no shortage of black American boxers, but they are no longer as dominant because of the global rise of the others," he said. "The U.S. can still produce a Jermain Taylor, an Andre Berto, an Andre Ward, but we will never again see weight classes dominated by black American fighters to the degree we saw that in the 1970s and '80s. Ethnocentric Americans tend to see that as a weakening of boxing, and they couldn't possibly be more wrong. What might be seen by some as the decline of the United States as a great power is not actually a decline, but rather an adjustment in position in relation to the rise of the others. The world has changed."

Which returns us to the sadness of it all. How could this happen? Why did this happen? How did we -- a people who took so much pride in our position in boxing and our place in the sport's history -- allow this to happen? To the sport and to us.

Yes, the national discussion has centered on baseball, not boxing. But boxing's transition into nonblackness is more drastic for African-Americans. Yes, baseball is the more popular sport, but it's not a sport blacks have necessarily dominated. Yes, we have been a large part of baseball, but it never has been a sport we can call one of ours. Basketball, track and boxing are three sports we mythically have been able to claim. With that in mind, the degree of loss of blacks in boxing is more important to analyze than the decline in baseball. The impact of blacks' holding few title belts is as serious as our representing just 8 percent of major leaguers.

Is boxing's problem one America should be discussing and trying to fix the same way it seems to be concerned with and trying to fix the issue in baseball?

Probably so. But if we -- the race of people formerly known as boxers -- don't act as if we care, then why should anyone else?
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Mitchell Kane · Aug 4, 2008

Rick Morrisey in the Chicago Tribune:

Rick Morrissey: Boxing beats the heck out of MMA
Rick Morrissey

In the wake of the news

August 4, 2008

I get it that boxing is dying. Or at least I get it that boxing is perceived to be dying. We're all in the process of dying. But that simple fact does not take away from the truth that each of us has inherent value, even as we head toward certain death.

If you've been paying any attention to the burgeoning popularity of mixed martial arts, you know that boxing has become uncool. It's as if your father has started wandering the neighborhood in shorts, black socks and wingtips.

It's sad. Yes, this will be a plaintive defense of the sweet science, and there will be a decent amount of head-scratching over what makes MMA so attractive to so many people.

It comes from someone who finds MMA, compared with boxing, unsatisfying. I'm not saying I don't like a good cage match. But after a few years of watching MMA, I've realized that the ultimate-fighting matches I find most appealing are the ones that involve the most boxing.

Watching two guys breathing on each other for a minute or more while they try to extricate themselves from a tangle of arms and legs on the ground leaves me frustrated. So do the weak punches and elbows thrown at a fighter who is trying to play turtle from a prone position. Watching one opponent put another in a chokehold leaves me feeling empty. Then again, so does a boxing match in which two fighters spend most of the bout in a clinch.

But when boxing is good, when two fighters are going at it with skill and fury, it's very good. When MMA is good, it's very good too. The problem is that it's not very good enough of the time.

I think we can agree that for all the various reasons we might be attracted to blood sports â€” the incredible dedication, the athleticism, the nobleness of competition â€” it's the blood we're after most.

And that's the tease of MMA. The fighters use much smaller gloves than boxers, and thus the chance for blood is high, as long as punches are thrown and landed cleanly. The problem with the sport is that many bouts lack punches and, therefore, punch.

I don't want to give the impression that I'm a huge boxing fan. When I'm channel surfing, I'll usually stop for boxing and MMA. I'm not against MMA. I'm for boxing. I prefer knockouts to submissions. Feel free to consider me a picky barbarian.

As I write this, I realize that what bothers me about ultimate fighting is the ground-fighting part of it. Before MMA's arrival, ESPN and other networks showed kickboxing matches. I'd watch those if they washed ashore while I was surfing. I can appreciate a good kick to the head, as long as it's not my head. But when wrestling and some of the hand-to-hand martial arts were added to the equation, it felt as if everything was slowed down.

Ground fighting has a tendency to grind things to a virtual halt. During the recent Miguel Cotto-Antonio Margarito welterweight title fight, HBO announcer Jim Lampley said something along the lines of, "We promised you violence, and we gave you violence!"

You could almost feel boxing's desperation in his voice. The message was that MMA doesn't have the market cornered on brutality.

Margarito won an 11th-round technical knockout. It was a wonderful display of Cotto's boxing skills and Margarito's relentlessness. Cotto's record fell to 32-1. Margarito is 37-5.

That brings me to another sore spot. When you watch an MMA title fight, it's not unusual to see a fighter with a 9-4 record going for a championship. Randy Couture, one of the legends of ultimate fighting, has a 16-8 record. Yes, it's a young sport, and fighters are evolving. But why do the best of the best seem to lose so often?

I can already hear MMA fans' rebuttal: Because everybody in the sport is so good. What's the deeper meaning of the sport's popularity?

I had an ultimate fighter once tell me that every man has a warrior inside him wanting to come out. Perhaps, but nothing in that explanation separates MMA from boxing.

Maybe the allure has to do with a yearning for a world with no rules. It's no-holds-barred street fighting, and nobody gets arrested afterward. It's "Mad Max."

The demographics for MMA skew younger than boxing, and that's exciting for anyone with a product to sell. It's why ESPN the Magazine featured ultimate fighter Kimbo Slice on its cover. It's why CBS aired the Slice-James Thompson fight in prime time.

The highlight of the May bout came when Slice burst one of Thompson's cauliflower ears with a punch. Hey, at least there was a punch thrown.

rmorrissey@tribune.com

Copyright Â© 2008, Chicago Tribune
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ILLUMINATI · Aug 4, 2008

by the way....anybody knows how much PPv sales...Cotto vs. Margarito did...? I read in the maxboxing forum that i was somewhere between 400-500K....??

Mitchell Kane · Aug 4, 2008

ILLUMINATI said: ↑

by the way....anybody knows how much PPv sales...Cotto vs. Margarito did...? I read in the maxboxing forum that i was somewhere between 400-500K....??
Click to expand...

It may be between 450-500.

Hauser suggest 500. Dan Rafael has a blog entry on it, that I haven't read, but supposedly he's around that number as well.

Neil · Aug 4, 2008

scoop jackson is ignorant. did he claim rahman is one of the top black boxers pound for pound?

mikE · Aug 4, 2008

I rarely agree with mainstream articles as much as I did with the ones posted above.
Which indicates they aren't mainstream articles, I suppose. ::

Hut*Hut · Aug 5, 2008

nice articles, thanks for posting

whiskey · Aug 5, 2008

Mike Tyson was only mentioned twice.

Are you sure those are mainstream articles?

Ron King 702 · Aug 6, 2008

cliff notes plz

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Some mainstream looks at the sport of boxing

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Some mainstream looks at the sport of boxing

Mitchell Kane WBC Silver Diamond Emeritus Champ

Mitchell Kane WBC Silver Diamond Emeritus Champ

Mitchell Kane WBC Silver Diamond Emeritus Champ

Mitchell Kane WBC Silver Diamond Emeritus Champ

ILLUMINATI Roberto Duran

Mitchell Kane WBC Silver Diamond Emeritus Champ

Neil tueur de grenouilles

mikE "Twinkle Toes" McJack

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