Go ahead, boxing fan: Try to find a Saturday night HBO or Showtime main event since July outside of Andre Berto-Jan Zaveck that fully satisfied you. We already know you can’t find any main events on big-time pay-per-views that have done the trick.
But keep digging. It gets worse.
Very few of the best fighters in the world have been in satisfactory bouts in 2011. Taking my updated pound-for-pound list this week as but one measuring stick of who’s best, those 20 fighters have been in 34 fights, and of those, only nine have gotten even good marks from large percentages of fans — let alone excellent ones.
Rather, the exciting or surprising or otherwise dramatic and fulfilling cards have mostly been elsewhere: with lesser fighters on smaller networks (Delvin Rodriguez-Pawel Wolak on ESPN2), on smaller cards (several ShoBox main events), in untelevised bouts (Hernan Marquez-Luis Concepcion) or via unexpectedly shiny gems (Marcos Maidana-Erik Morales).
If this tempts you into thinking that HBO and Showtime should abandon broadcasts of the best fighters in favor of only limited brawlers, I would caution you against jumping to that conclusion too quickly. This is a false choice: Some of the best fighters in the world have been in boring or otherwise unfulfilling bouts in 2011, but if you take 2010’s year-end pound-for-pound list, the top 20 fighters were in 43 fights, 22 of them that got at least good reviews. (And there are other reasons I’d caution you against jumping to that conclusion besides, which I’ll get into at a future point.)
Something’s happened in 2011. But what?
This is part I of a two-part series this week aimed at figuring that out, and proposing solutions. In part I below, we’ll look at what went wrong and what went right with each of the fighters’ bouts, and why. The “why,” summarized: It’s been a combination of poor style clashes, less action-friendly styles from some individual boxers, deteriorated matchmaking, frequent timid efforts and an excessive number of controversial outcomes.
