This Saturday night's fight between Oscar De la Hoya and Floyd Mayweather is the biggest fight in at least a decade. A decade from now, it will certainly be the biggest fight in the previous decade. This is because boxing is getting cancelled as a major sport after Saturday night.
It's not like it's the last episode of Friends or a Kiss farewell tour. It's just that boxing is done as a major sport after De la Hoya, even if the sport's partisans don't know it. De la Hoya may be the most marketable fighter since Sugar Ray Leonard. Floyd Mayweather is undefeated. It's the biggest fighter of today versus the best fighter of today. Olympic gold medalist De la Hoya captured the popular imagination in a way that no boxer has done in the fifteen years he has been a known commodity. He has female admirers and hit records. He smiles and doesn't engage in poseur machismo. He's intelligent. When he says he's never been in a fight outside the ring you believe him. Boxing is slipping and no boxer, perhaps ever, will be as marketable as De la Hoya. He's the last of the throwbacks to an era when elite boxers were as well known as all-star shortstops and MVP quarterbacks. With De la Hoya gone, there will still be great boxing matches. There just won't be another superfight, that long-anticipated scrap that the public demands, that provokes $5-at-the-door house parties, that draws the casual sports fan to boxing, that gets talked about Monday morning at the water cooler.
Do you remember superfights? In the '80s, when I grew up, there were superfights between Roberto Duran, Sugar Ray Leonard, Marvin Hagler, and Tommie Hearns. They all fought each other and usually it was a huge, pay-per-view event. The Aaron Pryor-Alexis Arguello fights, Tyson-Spinks, and Holmes-Cooney are fights from those years that I remember as must-see TV--so much so that people were willing to fork over cash to watch what they normally got for free. The '70s, a time when my memories are faint, had even more superfights, and in the weight-class, heavyweight, that screams superfight. Muhammad Ali was once the most popular athlete in the world. There isn't a boxer in America today who is the most popular athlete in the city he lives in.
How did it get so bad? An alphabet-soup of "champions" in each weight division muddy the waters. Elite fighters taking whole years off destroys the concept of the "fighting champion." The relative absence of boxing on free television and the inflated ticket-prices of live boxing (which leads to half-empty arenas) hurt the sport. Mixed-martial arts drawing away an audience is also a factor, but my sense is that they have exploited boxing's problems, not caused them. Corruption is always been a problem for boxing, but especially so today.This is not because corruption in boxing is worse (It certainly isn't.). But because the public's tolerance for corruption is so much lower now.
Perhaps more harmful than all of this is the failure of American audiences to identify with the foreign fighters who currently dominate the sport. White ethnic fighters, with names like Marciano, Cooney, and Baer, are long gone. So, too, in a more deracinated America, is that ethnic pull that put Italians in the seats to watch Italians, Irish to watch Irish, and Jewish to watch Jewish. Blacks aren't far behind in their exodus from boxing. The best African American athletes now play football and basketball. There are excellent Hispanic Americans fighting, but that's about it. American fighters rule just three of sixteen weight classes. Boxing has become a foreign sport. We're too rich and too passive-agressive for a sport tailored for the poor and agressive-agressive. And we're to self-centered to get into guys named Wladimir Klitschko, Manny Pacquio, or Ricky Hatton, especially when they don't speak English, or speak it with an accent different from ours (that would be an English accent in Hatton's case).
But for one night only, you can pretend that boxing is atop the world again, the sport of kings. It's the Golden Boy versus the Pretty Boy. Enjoy it while you can, because after Saturday night it will never be that way again.
911 was an inside job
Excellent post and sadly true. Interesting too that De La Hoya promoted this fight himself. Does that say that nobody else was excited enough about this event to market it?
911 is a joke!
So who won?
