Boxing

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Comment by The insider on May 9, 2008 at 4:29pm

What's Wrong With Boxing?

Zab Judah and Miguel Cotto threw down last year in an old school slugfest at Madison Square garden. So, how come few cared?

You know a fight is good when the officials and judges at ringside need to get sheets of paper to shield themselves from the blood splashing from the ring.

That's what went down at a sold-out Madison Square Garden where Puerto Rico's Miguel Cotto and Zab "Super" Judah of Brooklyn banged it out in an old school slugfest.

Eventually, Cotto (30-0, 25 KO) won by TKO when the referee Al Mercante Jr. stopped the bout at 49 seconds of the 11th round. Cotto had a deep cut over his right eye and his bottom lip was big and swollen. Judah’s (34-5, 25 KO) right eye was swollen shut and still oozing blood an hour after the fight from a cut just over the eyebrow.

"If it wasn't the best fight of the year, it was one of the best," said Cotto, who retained his WBA welterweight championship and was easily ahead on all three judges' scorecards when the bout was stopped.

More fights like this and boxing need not worry about the emerging popularity of mixed martial arts.

"If you give the people these kinds of fights, there's no sport as exciting as the sport of boxing," said Top Rank promoter Bob Arum.

Arum may or may not be right. Yes, fans enjoy exciting fights, but boxing is already giving you exciting fights. Fans are slipping away from the sport and boxing does need to worry about the emergence of mixed martial arts, but not for the reasons that people inside of boxing are trying to say. The reality is boxing is still exciting. There’s been no fall off. This fight was as exciting as any of the Hagler or Hearns fights from the ‘80s.

The problem is boxing’s lack of control. There is no real governing body that oversees the sport, just a bunch of pretenders. Why are there three or four different belts for one weight class? That’s silly. Most of the time the WBO and IBF, two of boxing’s governing bodies, don’t agree on a champion which is confusing to the average fan.

Also, there are too many controversial decisions. Any time an entire arena can be stunned by the judges’ scorecards, the system needs to be evaluated. The simple move of having open scoring (showing the judge’s scorecards after each round) will keep the fans in the loop and the judges honest.

Back in the day, everybody knew who the heavyweight champion of the World was – even non-boxing fans. Boxing was that big. You had characters like Riddick Bowe and ambassadors like Muhammad Ali to cheer for. Ali put the sport on his back and together with the help of Howard Cosell, marketed and promoted it brilliantly.

There are no boxers with Ali’s stature today. Mike Tyson bites off Evander Holyfield’s ear. Oliver McCall cries in the ring instead of fighting Lenox Lewis. Fighters go up and down weight classes like they’re riding merry-go-rounds. Roy Jones doesn’t fight any worthy opponents for ten years. And on and on.



Last month’s De La Hoya/Mayweather fight was a shining example of what the sport can and easily could be. The two camps worked together ahead of time to promote the fight. They showed up where they were supposed to be and even coordinated to get an HBO pre-fight reality show done. This was a case where you had two sensible camps in Mayweather and De La Hoya. They both understood what it took to make the fight a success.

After the smartly done promotion, Oscar and Floyd gave us one of the greatest fights this century which is of course, the basis of everything.

However, if there were one governing body in charge of boxing that had real control and was respected by the boxers and their camps, then fights could go like this all the time. The NFL, NBA, NHL and Major League Baseball routinely have their athletes show up for various promotions and events. This is regular media time and it doesn’t usually turn into a fist fight -- although those sports don’t have opposing athletes in the same press conference.

A governing body could create a loose schedule, so that fighters don’t “retire” after each fight. It could also guarantee that worthy fighters would get a shot at a fighter ranked higher than them. In other words, no one can duck a particular fighter. Imagine if in the NBA, the Los Angeles Lakers decided that they were not going to play the Phoenix Suns?

The sport of boxing is definitely broken. There is plenty of talent out there, but with no real entity being fully in charge of the sport, mixed martial arts and ultimate fighting may very well make the sweet science a thing of the past.