2005 was a tale of two half-years. The first six months were as good an interval the sport has seen in recent memory, packed with memorable fights and meaningful showdowns. Yet as 2005 passed the halfway point, that momentum seemingly petered out, with pay-per-view dreck that wasn’t as good as an average HBO or Showtime cable card, and with expensive frequency (or not, if you buy on merit).
The second part of the year was proof that an equal and opposite reaction will kick in once gravitational forces push an object in a certain direction. It was as though boxing, seemingly stumbling into some semblance of quality programming, couldn’t help but make up for it with bad offerings and all the usual suspect mandatories and contractual standoffs barring key matchups from coming to fruition.
So, in the spirit of reductionism, here’s my wish of “Don’t wants” for 2006:
NO EVANDER HOLYFIELD OR MIKE TYSON BOUTS, RUMORED OR REAL
Both are first-ballot Hall of Fame material, if only they’d formally retire. There’s a ton of talent and action outside of the heavyweights (heck, even the cruisers are unifying with the Jan. 7 showdown of Jean-Marc Mormeck and O’Neil Bell) yet most of the mainstream sporting ink on boxing is dormant until one of these two appears in a ring.
And lately, that’s generated bad press for the sport because both are so far from their primes. Tyson realizes it; Holyfield does not. I’d like to make it through 2006 without either of these guys fighting to let other guys like Floyd Mayweather, Zab Judah, Jeff Lacy, Joe Calzaghe, Jermain Taylor and the Fab Four (Marco Antonio Barrera, Erik Morales, Manny Pacquiao and Juan Manuel Marquez) get the attention that Holyfield and Tyson suck up, both from media and casual fans.
Mere mention of a Tyson bout – often in some far-flung locale like Singapore or Timbuktu – steals ink. Stop. It. Now. And with rumors surfacing that Holyfield may be contemplating a bout with Nicolay Valuev, let’s be real clear: any promoter that makes that happen should have his nuts chopped off.
NO MORE BOXREC.COM-QUALITY MAIN EVENTS ON HBO
Rules of thumb don’t seem to exist any more in matchmaking. For example, just a couple years ago, any pay-per-view bout wasn’t a case of whether or not I wanted to order it, but whether or not I could say no. Nowadays, you don’t lose sleep by not ordering half of the junk they foist up. A lot of these guys I don’t even know who they are……that was never the case a few years ago, where PPV was the bastion of top fighters that were proven commodities. Ditto for knowing any guy appearing on HBO.
The company’s main events have really slipped in 2005, both on the cable channel and PPV offerings, so much so that another seemingly inviolable rule – not having to go to boxrec.com to look up a guy’s record when he’s in the main event – is voided.
This applies to junk matches like Mayweather-Henry Bruseles and Fernando Vargas-Raymond Joval. Perhaps it’s the lack of the feeder mechanisms that used to exist, where you’d catch a fighter on ESPN, USA or even network television before he appeared on pay cable. But too often, the gut feeling going into the bout that it will be low quality is confirmed. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times, and Barrera-Mzonke Fana II is on.
Showtime, which used to be the perennial second banana, closed the gap considerably this year, and had superior matches. The gap is no longer clearly discernible, and here’s hoping HBO improves its matchmaking…which leads us to…
NO MORE JUNK PAY PER VIEWS
If peddling influence to targeted groups were a crime, in 2005, HBO would be the Jack Abramoff of boxing. The company pitched Pay Per View shows this year that were specifically designed as litmus tests as to whether the Hispanic fan base would buy something – anything – with the mere pull of a popular Hispanic boxer headlining.
I still blame Oscar De La Hoya-Yory Boy Campas as the trial balloon that started this trend. Fights that went off at 10-1 and grossed the favorite a cool ten million used to be an anomaly reserved for the heavyweights, and almost always Mike Tyson. The market will correct itself, eventually…one hopes…but boxing can hardly afford to bleed its fan base with crap PPVs.
The problem isn’t that all pay per views are junk; It’s that there are too many junk pay per views in addition to the good stuff.
2005 had solid matchups that sold well, ranging from Winky Wright-Felix Trinidad (510,000 buys), Floyd Mayweather vs Arturo Gatti did 350,000; Erik Morales-Manny Pacquiao (350,000), and Jermain Taylor-Bernard Hopkins (370,000 for first fight, with 410,000 for the rematch). All those were broadcast by HBO’s PPV arm. And the April ESPN card had three solid matchups on it for a good price at $29.95 despite the fact that the Juan Diaz-Ebo Elder bout didn’t come off. That was a winner.
However, there was also Barrera’s not-fit-for-PPV shows against Fana and Robbie Peden; Mike Tyson’s swan song against Kevin McBride (a princely $49.95, to boot, thanks to Showtime..guilty!); the Roy Jones-Antonio Tarver rubber match (HBO, another $49.95) was dreary, to say the least, and more style than substance. Throw in lower priced shows like the David Tua-Cisse Salif sleeper, Julio Cesar Chavez-Ivan Robinson, and you get the drift.
It wasn’t like 2005 was an anomaly.
2004 had two John Ruiz appearances on PPV, against Fres Oquendo and Andrew Golota, about three more then he deserved. Even matchups that were legit PPV on paper didn’t deliver much action. Oscar De La Hoya-Bernard Hopkins was a sleepwalk until it ended in anticlimactic fashion. And Vitali Klitschko-Danny Williams barely broke the 100,000 mark, despite it being the closest thing the sport had to a heavyweight champion defending his title. You can’t fix a broken leg till you agree to wear a cast and let it heal up, and boxing’s power brokers need to wise up, quick-fast.
For $34.95, a fight fan would be pretty happy to get 6 to 8 bouts, half of which were 3-1 along with at least a couple of pick’ems, a few highlight reel-knockouts, and filler bouts put in depending on if they were exciting. It happens a lot. But the problem is that it’s always in mixed martial arts, most of which stateside is The Ultimate Fighting Championship.
UFC hopes to broadcast over a dozen shows in 2006, some of which will be on SpikeTV, and the rest on pay-per-view. The real question is what boxing will do to counter-program against mixed martial arts, and how much of their audience could be potentially captured. There will always be boxing fans who look down on MMA and don’t like it, but too readily confuse their own sentiments with a wider consensus. Intimately familiar with the demographics of both, I can tell you that MMA is far more diverse, along lines of ethnicity and age. The fan base is huge under 40, and crowds aren’t broken down into ethnicity-based fiefdoms that define boxing’s marketing strategy. They come out to watch all the fighters.
To further compound the MMA challenge, the Pride fighting organization – UFC’s Japan-based competitor – started showing bouts on FOX this year and could be targeting the American market as well. It was a stunning week in October when, between PRIDE and UFC rebroadcasts and the UFC reality show “The Ultimate Fighter” I realized I’d watched more mixed martial arts that week on cable TV than I’d seen of boxing for a month.
HBO will reportedly air 14 World Championship Boxing dates in 2006, up from 10 this year. And Boxing After Dark, which saw five dates in 2005, will have at least 10 shows. That’s a considerable increase in quantity, but quality needs to rise if that increase in programming is going to grow the fan base.
If boxing doesn’t get to work on this, and putting together more quality programming per fan dollar, you might as well be rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
NO MORE PREFIGHT BRAWLS MORE INTERESTING THAN THE ACTUAL BOUT
James Toney and Hasim Rahman have apparently already scrapped, according to reports this week that alleged the two hooked up at a resort in Cancun Monday, where the WBC convention was taking place.
No word on who got the better of it, but I hear that by the time it was broken up, Jo Jo Guerra had Ray Leonard well ahead.
Seriously, though. This bout doesn’t seem exciting in terms of the style matchup and the possibility of belting a WBC champ really just extends the Don King fiefdom, where most of the exciting action in his stable – IBF champ Chris Byrd, new WBA king Nicolay Valuev, and WBO boss Lamon Brewster – is seeing who’ll make a legal move first to bolt.
Usually this is just a preamble to getting bigger fights for King’s men, a sort of leverage that he responds to with a carrot, albeit usually smaller than that requested. I still want to see Byrd or Brewster take on Wladimir Klitschko – options be damned. Toney-Rahman, at worst, will be inconclusive in determining who the better guy is. Another reason to ignore the heavyweights. We’re two and a half years removed from the retirement of Lennox Lewis and not a whit of clarity has emerged as to who the real champion is, while the attendant subplots to determine that are boring and insular. It’s a bad film that never ends.
The only interesting fights for Toney are Wladimir Klitschko or Samuel Peter – someone who will come after him and try to take his head off. Anything else is a slow burn, and the mercurial Rahman might be more exciting than Ruiz was against Toney, but that’s not much to look forward to. Methinks Toney wins a decision but the heavies need a blowout match to rekindle interest. The division could use him because he can talk as good a fight as he can give, but he keeps getting the wrong dance partners.
