There is a double standard in boxing, make no mistake about it.
In the face of cultural advances in society, boxing is still very much a sport where rich white men pit poor minorities against one another in a blood sport reported on by a mostly Caucasian, upper middle-class media. The sport’s narrative is controlled by white people, the agendas are set by white people, and despite a good portion of the fan base being black and Latino, the product is still very much angled towards a white audience. With the exception of Al Haymon, the few “minority” shot callers in the sport operate with obvious glass ceiling limitations. Ultimately, if you are a minority in boxing or labeled as “just” a fighter, you have to answer to a Caucasian establishment at some point.
And, yeah, the above statement will, indeed, raise a shit storm with many of those who read it. But it’s true.
If you doubt the veracity, just look at what happens to fighters who get too “uppity” with their insistence on career independence or those minority boxing businessmen who try to set up fully operational, self-sufficient, and independent boxing organizations. Efforts are made to chase down and destroy those who have the audacity to try and escape from the boxing plantation.
Floyd Mayweather may be a lot of things, but at the very least, he’s keenly aware of this plantation mentality in the sport and why so much related to his own career has been bogged down in ugly double standards. His recent comments to FightHype.com may be concerning the Andre Ward-Gennady Golovkin-Sergey Kovalev dynamic, but they could just as easily be applied to several instances from his own career where efforts were made to diminish his own accomplishments by creating artificial obstacles on his career path.
“Whoever is forcing Andre Ward to go up to [light] heavyweight, that’s not cool at all. They’re trying to get him beat. From the looks of things, what’s going on in the sport of boxing, they want their superstar to be Caucasian. It’s obvious. And this has been going on for a very long time. They wanted me to lose to [Manny] Pacquiao, but that didn’t happen,” Mayweather told Ben Thompson via phone interview.
And while it may not be entirely a race issue, it is clear that white fighters showing the least bit of proficiency are given every benefit of every doubt by a white media talking to a white audience for the ultimate benefit of the white men who run the sport.
The obvious favoritism towards certain fighters can be explained away as efforts to create new, more marketable and more fan-favorite boxing stars, and that’s understandable. But every effort was made to crush the one fighter who had actually proven himself to be a mainstream attraction by easily surpassing every conceivable box office and PPV record. If the boxing overlords wanted a star, they had one– but he wasn’t the right kind of star.
What the establishment really wants is a marketable, fan-favorite star who will be a “company man,” a good little pet who will do as told, happily take whatever is given to him, follow the script, and allow his career to be taken from him whenever it’s convenient for the money men to do so.
And in the American boxing scene, where much of the talent is black and Latino, the racial aspect can’t be ignored. Unlike other sports, which have taken steps towards diversity, boxing and its media have not. And as long as this lack of diversity exists, certain fighters who pursue career independence, like Mayweather and Ward, will always be painted as ungrateful, self-destructive, cowardly, disloyal, and greedy for biting at the white hand “gracious” enough to feed them.
