There were, it seemed, more movie stars and other celebrities in the crowd at the MGM Grand Garden on June 28, 1997, than there were for many Academy Award celebrations.
The media contingent to cover the heavyweight title rematch between Evander Holyfield and Mike Tyson was about the size of Vermont?s population.
It was only minutes before the fight and I can remember being frustrated. My Internet connection was dropping. There was no power for our laptops. Seating in the media section was beyond tight.
An electricity was pulsing through the crowd, but I was desperate to fix my connection problem, get a power strip and have the night end.
As I was feeling sorry for myself, the elderly man sitting next to me leaned over and whispered something I?ll never forget.
Jim Murray, the late columnist of the Los Angeles Times, was next to me. In my opinion, Murray is the greatest sports writer who ever lived and I was intimidated to be seated anywhere near him. I barely could speak.
I?m assuming Murray was having the same connection woes I was having. I know for certain his computer had to be running low on battery power. But the then-78-year-old sidled up to me and asked, ?How lucky are we??
Suddenly, I completely forgot about my computer problems. I surveyed an arena filled with people who had paid extraordinary amounts of money for the privilege.
I thought of the many more who would have given almost anything to be seated where I was, a few feet away from where one of the great sports spectacles of the decade was about to unfold.
As usual, Murray was right. I was lucky not only to be seated next to the Babe Ruth of sports writers, but also I had one of the best seats in the house for what would turn out to be one of the most memorable fights in boxing history.
I?d been a diehard boxing fan for more than 30 years at that point and I?ve not lost an ounce of passion for the fight game in the 11? years since.
And as I sit on Christmas Day with a new year beckoning, I pray that the sport can be saved from itself.
Fans who love the sport are frustrated and can?t understand why there are so many champions, why the champions don?t routinely fight each other, why there are so many mismatches on television and why the networks continue to turn up their noses at the sport.
However noble their intentions, it?s unrealistic to expect the weight classes to contract from 17 to eight, the sanctioning bodies to merge to form one respected group and for network TV executives to be bidding against each other for the right to broadcast a fight.
Boxing had a good year in 2008, but it can be better in 2009 with a few small changes and improvements.
To encourage the fighters to compete harder and to try to score a knockout, promoters should create a pot of prize money to be given to all the fighters who compete on a given night?s card. One award should be given to the two men in the ?Fight of the Night? and the other should be given to the man who earns ?Knockout of the Night.?
In other words, promoters and the TV executives, if the bout is broadcast, should create an incentive for the boxers to put on a better show. The Ultimate Fighting Championship does this routinely and it has an amazing impact.
A $50,000 ?Fight of the Night? bonus might not mean much to an Oscar De La Hoya or a Manny Pacquiao, but it would be huge to nearly all the other fighters on a card. When the fighters compete harder to earn a bonus, the fans are the winners.
Fans also will win if it?s easier to identify a champion in each division. One of the problems boxing faces is that the four major sanctioning bodies ? the IBF, the WBA, the WBC and the WBO ? don?t care about the sport at all and see it only as a money-making vehicle.
But promoters should refuse to allow sanctioning-body title fights on their cards unless the heads of those organizations agree in writing to not strip a champion for fighting a title-holder of one of the other bodies.
As an example, suppose that Shane Mosley upsets Antonio Margarito when they fight Jan. 24 in Los Angeles and wins the WBA welterweight title. If Mosley could arrange a fight in his next outing within 120 days with one of the other welterweight champions, the WBA would consider that his mandatory defense and would not strip him for taking that fight.
If he can?t reach an agreement or he simply doesn?t want to do so, then he goes forward under the present system and fights his mandatory.
As it is now, if Mosley won the fight, he would be obligated to fight the WBA?s mandatory challenger, who frequently doesn?t present nearly as interesting a match as another champion would.
If the promoters would not allow the bodies to sanction a bout without this agreement, that would hurt the sanctioning groups financially. Fans are probably not aware that the fighters have to pay up to three percent of their purses for the right to fight in a title bout. The fighters also have to pay to fight in title bout eliminators.
By implementing a system where the sanctioning bodies get paid only if they agree to sanction the bouts the fans want, it will provide for more title unification bouts and help the fans identify with one man per class much easier.
Finally, the boxers and promoters should make public access to the fighters easier. Only 20 years ago, fighters like Sugar Ray Leonard would hold public workouts frequently throughout a training camp. Muhammad Ali almost always welcomed fans or media to his training camp.
While the swarm can cause problems, the benefits of being fan-friendly are too great to be ignored. Boxers today almost routinely close their training to the public and the media and thereby are largely anonymous.
Boxing is a wonderful sport, but it?s not without warts. By making these small changes, the promoters are encouraging more entertaining and hard-fought bouts and helping to make the fighters more widely known. That leads to more ticket sales and creates a cycle in which the sport?s health can be reinvigorated.
