For the last couple years, there’s been a theory floating around that Washington, D.C. is ripe to be exploited as a “fight town,” that kind of U.S. city that embraces boxing and drives fans to the sweet science in droves. There were subtle pieces of evidence, like the enthusiastic showing at a D.C. press conference in 2010 for the Floyd Mayweather-Shane Mosley fight; the way shows in nearby Virginia featuring Jimmy Lange would sell thousands of tickets despite being largely insignificant to the bigger boxing picture; the way Paul Williams, who isn’t from here but trains in the region, said he would get accosted by fans eager to see him have a pro fight here.
Saturday night, that theory will get tested when junior welterweight Amir Khan — he’s one of the six or seven most gifted fighters in the world, and has rubbed shoulders with the likes of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton — takes on local boy Lamont Peterson in a card that will feature several more of the region’s most promising boxers. It’s the first truly high-profile boxing match in Washington, D.C. since Mike Tyson-Kevin McBride in 2005, which was more of a sideshow than an actual fight. The ingredients are here for a card that could do very well. And if it does do well, maybe, just maybe, D.C. puts itself on the boxing map indefinitely.
Personally, as a D.C. resident, I’ve encountered very little “buzz” for the card. Outside the circle of my friends and acquaintances in the area who are already big boxing fans and would go anyway, nobody’s approached me asking me about the fight the way they do sometimes, knowing that I’m a boxing writer; nobody I’ve brought it up to seems to have heard about it; and I’ve not overheard anyone in supermarkets or on the street discussing it. There are reportedly a lot of posters around, but I’ve not seen any of them.
This could be a delayed effect. The local media only recently began picking up on the fact that there’s a big show happening — The Washington Post, for instance, which among the nation’s biggest newspapers is foremost in its neglect of boxing coverage, wrote its first article about the fight two days ago. Since, it’s written several more. So have other media outlets, perhaps inspired by a meeting between Peterson, his brother Anthony, local heavyweight Seth Mitchell and the mayor of the city. The lack of buzz I’ve heard could have something to do with the fact that neither Khan nor Peterson are household names at this phase of their careers, and won’t be for a while yet, at best. Very few boxers are.
