This past Tuesday, at around 7:30 a.m. in New York, or 4:30 a.m. in California, a small but stubborn faction of the American boxing audience (which is, itself, a small but stubborn faction of the broader sports audience) opened up the ESPN+ app and got ready to watch one of the year’s most eagerly anticipated fights: Stephen Fulton, the top fighter at junior featherweight, which has a limit of a hundred and twenty-two pounds, was facing Naoya Inoue, a Japanese star who was moving up from bantamweight, which has a limit of one-eighteen, and who was considered one of the best and most exciting fighters in any weight division. Fulton comes from Philadelphia, but he doesn’t have much of a home-town fan base, especially compared to Inoue, which explains why the fight was held in front of a sold-out crowd at Ariake Arena, in Tokyo—and which helps explain, too, why the event did not capture the attention of more American fans.
In most sports, there is a reliable correlation between excellence and prominence: you become a star by winning, and winning again. But boxing is not a normal sport: it often functions less as a meritocracy than a marketplace, with the biggest rewards going to whoever can draw the biggest crowds. If you want to be a star, especially in America, a winning record is necessary but not sufficient. And sometimes in boxing the causation works in reverse: the more popular you are, the more power you have to select an opponent whom you think you can beat, or to negotiate home-arena advantage; in that sense, being a star can help you win. In recent years, there has been a growing divergence: the best fighters do not always make the biggest fights. For hard-core fans, this is an extraordinary week, featuring not just Fulton vs. Inoue but also, on Saturday night, the long-hoped-for meeting of Terence Crawford and Errol Spence, Jr., a pair of undefeated virtuosos in the welterweight division (a hundred and forty-seven pounds). “This fight sells itself,” Crawford has said, but although he and Spence are superlative competitors, they are both rather low-key personalities. It’s not clear how many casual sports fans will be willing to pay eighty-five dollars for the pay-per-view broadcast of their fight.
Many of the most popular fights, of course, are the ones that feature big names, even if those names belong to people who are no longer the most skilled fighters, or never were. In 2020, two aging legends, Mike Tyson and Roy Jones, Jr., drew a big audience by clambering back into the ring for a good-natured exhibition match. Floyd Mayweather, Jr., who has been essentially retired since 2015, has come back for some novelty mismatches. (He recently fought John Gotti III, a novice boxer from a famous family.) Jake Paul, a former actor and YouTube star, has become a top boxing attraction by taking the sport seriously, and by leveraging his polarizing reputation; when you buy a Jake Paul fight, part of what you are buying is the chance to see him get punched in the face. (On August 5th, Paul will fight Nate Diaz, a popular mixed-martial-arts veteran who will be making his professional-boxing début.) Influencer boxing is now essentially a sport of its own, thanks largely to an organization called Misfits Boxing, which stages fights between Internet-famous demi-celebrities, promising viewers minimal technical skill and maximal mayhem, and often delivering on both counts. One recent Misfits fight was cancelled after a press conference during which one competitor assailed his opponent, who is Muslim, with “sausages that were believed to be pork meat,” according to a termination letter apparently sent by the organization to the sausage-thrower; another, a tag-team match, was upstaged when the members of the winning team turned on each other and brawled after the final bell.
