Same S#!T, Different Saturday

Boxers need to accept reality. The so-called stars are grossly overpaid. As a result the availabale money for the opponent and undercard alyways run short. Fights like Cintron/Ndou and Haye/Barrett plus that whole shitty undercard are exactly what boxing doesn´t need.

Boxers need to fight more often. Boxing needs more competitive match-ups. Boxing needs to get rid of the image of the "0", something UFC has established very well. Which is not to say the UFC won´t face the same problems as the sport grows.


Boxing needs to be get back to network television. Only real cards with worthy line-ups from top to bottom should be PPV. TV station and promoters have taken boxing into the direction of an elitist sport, with ridiculous ticketprices and PPV costs. Call me cheap, but I would never pay 1500 dollars for ringside tickets or 60 dollars for a PPV. It makes no sense that a Champions League football match is cheaper than a 7th row seat for Urkal/Harris.

 

Fighters more active. Networks more selective. Promoters more pro-active.

It would be nice.

Fights like Pavlik-Lockett and Cotto-Gomez shouldn't be on HBO. They should be left like Hatton-Lazcano for other networks to pick up.

 

No, it would solve ONE problem.

It would be help, but boxing has too many problems to say that one thing alone with fix all of them.

 

It's mainly just a money thing. There are some rare cases where champs with big names are still very active (Chavez and Toney in the early 90s, DLH in 1997), but most of the well paid fighters will fight less often. Toney didn't have that nice HBO contract money (he would've if he'd beaten Jones) and Chavez was promoted by King (who knows how much he really got?). The HW champs were generally well paid, so even in the old days when guys were fighting so often, the HW champs usually didn't defend that often.

 

I agree with the sentiment that the UFC has shown a blueprint for how to make boxing strong again. This particular piece was aimed at the "get the word out and give it more exposure" angle, but the same holds true for consolidating the belts, etc.

ideally, HBO and other networks should invest in getting more than one fight on air during a telecast. For PPV's they show more than just the main event, and that needs to be the game-plan for regular cards as well. Getting these unknown guys exposure is a good start, to help everyone...

 

I don't think a ppv should have anything less than 3 fights everyone wants to see and one fight with prospects. Hell I think a guy like Cotto should be an undercard for a ppv like DLH/Pac. That is the only way to make new stars quickly.

 

You can't make anyone fight more. And you 'one title' guys invariably don't believe in stripping titles.
The ones who need to be protected are the non-titlists. Multiple titles is why they always get their title shots. And that's far more important to the sport than keeping things simple for the casual and non-fans.

 

I miss the days of stacked PPVs, but those days are gone. Don King was probably really underpaying them to put so many quality fighters on one card. You had Lennox Lewis defending his WBC belt, Jackson/G-Man on the undercard of a Chavez bout. Later on that year, you had Terry Norris fighting, and also had Nelson-Leija, on the undercard of Whitaker-Chavez. Great cards that King had during the mid 90s.

Cotto used to be an undercard fighter for DLH, but he's a bigger name now, so now he's a main event fighter.

 

I thought Top Rank handled Cotto's development well, and seemed to have come back down to earth with Juan Manuel Lopez. Following the PDL knockout, Arum said that it would be the last ever time JuanMa would ever appear in an HBO co-feature slot. Everyone looked at him like he was nuts, that the kid still had a way to go before proving to be a headliner. The talent sure, but nowhere near the noteriety.

One subpar performing PPV later, he's now in the co-feature slot on DLH-Pacquiao. Right where he belongs, as then maybe he can go on to be a main event fighter on the level Arum suggests.

The irony of the King cards being as loaded as they were back in the day was that it came at the height of cable piracy (the Black Box era). You got more for free 15 or so years than what you have to pay for today.

 

Oh really? So when a champion decides to not defend against the 'best', then it's okay to strip him? Or if he doesn't 'fight often enough'? Or if he refuses to fight a certain contender?

Almost sounds like a situation where there would be multiple belts, doesn't it?

 

Props on the article. Good job.

 

Fear of satellite piracy, particularly from bars I assume, meant that King's ppv cards were not shown on satellite (big dish). This locked out a huge % of fans who had no way to watch the ppv because they lived in areas that didn't have cable or didn't have cable companies that would buy the rights to the ppv shows. So, people like myself, who had spent $2500 and $90/mo for satellite to be able to watch boxing were fucked.

Only when Tyson came out of jail and fought McNeeley did big dish get the ability to buy King's ppv's (1995). Of course, back then ppv's were maybe bi-monthly. And then around 1998 (I think), the better security of small dish satellite started the shutdown of big dish availability of ppv's again.

Oh, the good ol' days.

 

thanks Joe