Boxing’s Slow and Steady Suicide

If ever problems were self-induced, it’s the sport of boxing’s. When boxing comes up in a discussion the inevitable reaction is ‘boxing’s still around?’ or ‘people still box?’ Not surprising when you think about how low a profile boxing currently has.

It’s difficult to believe that in the first half of the 20^th century, boxing was one of 3 major sports in the United States, along with horse racing and surpassed in popularity only by baseball. Boxing barely registers with sports fans in general today and even fight fans specifically. MMA has outstripped boxing’s popularity because it’s far better run (mainly by the leading organization, the UFC) than boxing ever was. People in charge of boxing have managed to make it inaccessible to the public. owing to a preponderance of fights on PPV. Greed has gotten the best of boxing at the expense of common sense and intelligent marketing.

I was a huge boxing fan from the early 1980’s until about Y2K. Quality fights were routinely on free TV with only the bigger matches on cable and super-fights reserved for PPV or closed circuit. This only helped to build excitement when it came to a much-anticipated matchup. You know the fight was of importance when you had to tune in to HBO or Showtime to watch on TV or head down to the local venue that was showing a fight. As much as I loved boxing itself it became more and more difficult to follow with everything that swirled around it. Greedy promoters who insisted on the public paying for everything they tried to pass off as a title fight. Corrupt organizations that made up their rules as they went along regarding championship defenses, excessive title fight fees and money for contenders to step aside amongst other transgressions. More and more weight classes every decade and new sanctioning bodies constantly popping up to create a situation where you have several times as many ‘champions’ as you had in the golden age of the sport. New rules introduced under the guise of fighter safety that weren’t well thought out and only helped to water down the quality of the sport. A rash of terrible judging, always in the highest profile matches it seemed, that helped to make boxing look very minor-league.

The growth of MMA in the past decade, owing to the UFC’s president Dana White’s reorganizing of the sport with a more civilized set of rules, has been a direct challenge to boxing with fight fans, especially young ones. The UFC is viewed as far more exciting and easier to relate to than boxing since it more closely resembles fighting in its’ most basic form. MMA is also a lot more accessible with a network TV show, a deal with the Fox Network to show fights live and PPV shows every few weeks. Boxing might have a fight of real consequence once or twice a year, none of which are available on free TV.

Since boxing has not been able to capture many of the younger fans, it has pretty much doomed itself to a slow extinction. Its fan base is growing older by the year and the amount of new fans latching onto the sport won’t be enough to keep it at even its current level of popularity. Boxing is more and more becoming a fringe sport that fewer and fewer people care about.