Boxing, I’m done. A 40+-year relationship, and I’m done. Count me out.
This was driven home with the recent passing of middleweight legend Marvelous Marvin Haggler (not to mention Floyd Mayweather’s latest act; more below), but like many breakups it’d been in the works for years.
If you want to understand a sport, we’re told, go to the experts. Sure, they can offer brilliant insight that might rub off on you like fairy dust. But it’s the laypeople who can really convey how Dale Earnhardt is one-of-a-kind or how Roger Federer simply feels different, and how entire Sundays (and Mondays and Thursdays) get spent watching men in helmets, pads and tights beat the brains out of each other.
It’s also the layperson who can tell boxing why it can go fuck itself.
First Encounters
I first boxed when I was three. It was my father who dressed me up in a bathrobe, wrapped and taped towels around my fists, had me enter the ring, take a bow and then square off against an all too familiar opponent: my identical twin brother.
Dad and Mom (maybe she’d had a few drinks and could tolerate it) watched as my brother scored a first round TKO. Blood spilled from my brow to the floor and the fight was called. I don’t remember any horror, fear or pain. Only an echo of laughter—and that I’d lost.
When my dad left a year or so later, watching boxing became a tether. But boxing, I was relieved to find out, wasn’t just for my dad. I was, quite simply, leaning into the best sport of its era.
And that era would include Haggler but also Roberto “Hands of Stone” Duran and Thomas “Hit Man” Hearns and “Sugar” Ray Leonard—each of them legends, each fighting the other—and it was bookended by Ali and Tyson.
As for Haggler, he held the middleweight title from 1980-87. During this stretch he took part in what some call the single greatest round versus Hearns, and he also lost an epic 12-round split decision that went to Leonard and that also still evenly splits those who watch it. When Leonard refused a rematch Haggler retired.
The great boxers go through their own narrative arcs—often hardscrabble upbringing, rise to fame and champion, and then a fall, sometimes later with a damaged body and brain and diminished finances as their cruel reward. (Roberto Duran has said, “Boxing doesn’t owe me nothing, and I don’t owe nothing to him. We are even.”)
The irony today is that their fall from grace can only be matched by the sport itself. How is that possible?
A Rise and Fall
Boxing at one time had it all, every ingredient you could ask for. A history truly worthy of study and reflection. Racism has been a part of it but so too has its efforts to confront it and to provide a real pathway to the disadvantaged. The sport could literally kill you but it could make you too. It possessed a phenomenal array of personalities. It started with the fighters themselves—truly household names like Marciano and Moore, Robinson, Foreman and Frazier, Chávez, De La Hoya, Holyfield. And it extended to the ringside—announcers like Howard Cosell and Larry Merchant and above all Jim Lampley whose genuine love of the sport enabled acts of deep reverence and apt disdain. They all understood the moment, loved its singular primal urgency and felt duty-bound to share it with the world.
Boxing, for all its blue-collar underpinnings, also had story and mythos on its side. Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates and A.J. Liebling reflected most memorably, bringing a language to what Liebling famously called the “sweet science of bruising.” Anyone still know the paintings of George Bellows? One certainly should.
But what is boxing now? Nothing really. In the crowded marketplace of sport it’s become irrelevant. If it stopped today who would care?
Money, Mayweather and Dodging Punches
Famed research psychologist John Gottman has found that the four greatest predictors of divorce are the Four Horseman. Not the ’80s pro wrestling faction but rather Criticism, Contempt, Defensiveness and Stonewalling. Of these, it’s said, stonewalling is the most deadly. That’s the act of avoiding appropriate confrontation so that one is left with the feeling that his or her needs have gone unmet. It breeds resentment and ultimately dissolves the marriage.
No figure over the last 20 years in boxing (and sports in general) has done more stonewalling than Floyd “Money” Mayweather.
Considered among the greatest “defensive” boxers of all time, Mayweather has made his living dodging not only punches but, to the downfall of the sport, entire matches with opponents. He infamously avoided an absolute superfight in the 2000s with the other historically great fighter of his era, Manny Pacquiao. When they finally fought in 2015, Pacquiao was well past his prime. Mayweather made more than $180 million (of $400+ million total, and $120+ million to Pacquiao) and both experts and more general viewers (potential future fans) were disappointed.
Mayweather’s latest in-ring endeavor will involve taking on “two fake fighters,” albeit on separate dates, with separate purses, each significant sums. And while he lines his pockets he turns boxing into a joke.
Boxing’s Central Flaw
For all its supposed bravado, its love affair with courage and heroism, boxing has a central flaw. It allows its fighters (and worse their promoters) to choose their opponents. (Contrast this with tennis, where you could be Serena Williams coming back from pregnancy and you might have to face the number one player in the world or several in the top 10 just to hold up a trophy. The sport, through a draw, assigns you your opponents. Every week on the pro tour is put up or shut up.)
But here’s the thing: Fans want “prize fighters.” As boxing analyst Max Kellerman has said, “When you’re a star, when you mean money, when you bring a following to the table the question is do you use that to avoid competition or are you a real prize fighter, saying line up the biggest prize, I’ll fight that guy.”
Choices, and One Last Fling?
We know how Mayweather answered this question. And we know how boxing had no power over that answer.
Devoted fans don’t want to just line an athlete’s pockets. They want what Nobel-winning economist Milton Friedman called “a mutual exchange“: they’ll give you money but you’re expected to offer something in return—in this case high-level athletic entertainment. That social contract with boxing, via Mayweather and the machinations of the sport itself, has not been respected and so the prospect of divorce gains credence.
It’s worth considering just how short-lived (and therefore how vulnerable) sport as mega entertainment actually is. We lose sight of that each time we stare into the tv screen hanging over the nightclub urinal.
But as with all types of entertainment (from music to movies to amusement parks to sporting events) I have both limited time and money to throw its way. I’d rather grow financially stable than be erratically entertained.
And I’ve now rejected lots of sports. College basketball (how can I be loyal to players, one and done, who are not?), WWE (merely fake and cartoonish), golf and NHL (no personal history or connection, not enough time), NFL (I prefer my family on Sundays), NBA (constant racializing, impoverished politicizing, free throws and endless commercials), cycling and the Olympics (untrustworthy, filthy) and MMA (not yet but I could be convinced). That leaves me with baseball (Orioles) and tennis (Federer)—at which one could level plenty of shortcomings.
And so what about boxing?
I was told that Canelo Alvarez just broke a U.S. boxing record for the largest indoor crowd (during Covid no less), scoring a 9th round knockout in the process. There’s talk that he could fight IBF super middleweight champ Caleb Plant in the fall. Were Canelo to win, the Mexican would become the first-ever undisputed champ at the 168 class.
Hmmm… How much is the PPV on that?