Boxing long ago stopped being one of America’s most popular sports and became a niche sport that roars, or whimpers, to life occasionally. Even with substantial strength in the lower weight divisions, the heavyweight class is in a trough, seeking charisma, or at least a Wheaties box.
Mike Tyson is still a star, a telling fact at a time when there are four heavyweight champions of minor renown. His fight on Saturday against Kevin McBride is already a consumer fraud on pay-per-view at $44.95.
Yet even as boxing faces federal oversight, filmmakers and television producers see the sport’s basic dramatic appeal. It is useful to point out that none of these efforts have anything to do with boxing as we now know it.
“Million Dollar Baby,” the 2004 film about a female boxer played by Hilary Swank and a trainer played by Clint Eastwood, grossed just over $100 million and won Academy Awards for best picture, best actress, best supporting actor and best director.
Ken Burns re-examined the astonishing life of the black champion Jack Johnson in “Unforgivable Blackness” and attracted 13.7 million PBS viewers. “Ring of Fire,” a gritty, emotional documentary, recalled the death of Benny Paret after a 1962 bout at Madison Square Garden against Emile Griffith, and attracted 3.9 million viewers in seven showings on USA.
Two reality series tracked fledgling fighters; each failed to get renewed, but any network carrying a boxing match would shampoo Don King’s hair to get the 6.2 million weekly viewers that NBC’s “Contender” garnered.
And this past weekend, “Cinderella Man,” Ron Howard’s film starring Russell Crowe as the Depression-era heavyweight champion James J. Braddock, grossed $18.6 million at the box office, more than any single week of business for “Million Dollar Baby.”
“We need this movie,” the trainer Angelo Dundee, who tutored Crowe, said last week during a conference call. “We’re in trouble with boxing.”
There was no planning in this televised and cinematic boxing.
“It’s part of the zeitgeist,” Burns said. “We’re all trolling for new ways to examine the same old same old, and the water we’re drinking is saying, ‘boxing.’ “
It’s no surprise that boxing attracted filmmakers like Burns and Howard or a reality TV producer like Mark Burnett of “The Contender.”
“Boxing is the ideal template for character drama,” said Jim Lampley, the HBO boxing commentator who is hoping to sell a series to FX about a boxer. “It begins with an elemental conflict that anyone can understand, and it’s not too difficult to build subplots outward from that beginning place.”
How much this translates to helping boxing is uncertain. On one level, for millions of people to watch TV shows or attend movies with boxers as the central characters is a positive for a perpetually sickly business.
The promoter Bob Arum points to the 1976 film “Rocky” as an industry-lifter “that had a profound effect on our business,” but boxing had Muhammad Ali and an up-and-coming Sugar Ray Leonard as transcendent personalities.
Bert Sugar, the boxing historian, doubts that those who watched Crowe fight as Braddock will instantly become fans and buy tickets to a fight or pay $50 for a pay-per-view show.
“I haven’t seen anything to indicate that any of this leads to ticket sales,” he said. “Every sport needs an Ali or a Tiger Woods, and what we’ve got are Hilary Swank and Russell Crowe, and they’re not fighting.”
Boxing is now dominated by fighters in lower weight classes – and rarely broadly known athletes. Still, the recent Manny Pacquiao-Erik Morales bout drew 350,000 pay-per-view buyers, great for a junior lightweight fight but not something to build an industry on.
Boxing is that rare sport that showcases its best fights by shrinking its market to the pay-per-view universe, then charging $40 or more to watch. In Ali’s heyday, many of his bouts could be seen on ABC’s “Wide World of Sports.” It was a time when broadcast network advertisers did not shun boxing.
“It’s bad for the sport,” said Arum, whose recent card starring the aging Julio Cesar Chavez produced at least 120,000 pay-per-view buys, a testament to the Hispanic customer base that helps boxing survive. “We go to pay-per-view because boxing dates and money are limited.”
By limiting the distribution of its most valuable product to pay-per-view, boxing has abandoned the broad audience reached by films and TV programs. “It’s anti-developmental to the sport,” Lampley said.
Boxing is a series of one-night financial stands that can generate a huge windfall. A rare fight can, in a few hours, outgross a major Hollywood feature. Lennox Lewis’s destruction of Tyson three years ago grossed $112 million on two million purchases, about $12 million more than that of “Million Dollar Baby” after seven months in theaters.
The only nonheavyweights who have come relatively close to that peak are Bernard Hopkins, Oscar De La Hoya and Felix Trinidad, all at or near the end of their careers. And their greatest triumphs are not as accessible as “Million Dollar Baby” will be in its upcoming DVD, which will be cheaper than the cost of any pay-per-view bout.
