As you look around press row and see the diminishing number of writers covering the fights for major daily newspapers, you’re reminded of the polar bears who are fighting for their survival as the ice caps melt away.
They say within 25 years that there will be a significantly smaller number of polar bears as less and less of their natural habitat exists.
Well, like these animals, it seems boxing scribes from the most traditional realm of the media have become endangered species on the brink of extinction themselves.
“There used to be a lot more of them,” said Kathy Duva, who chuckled at the comparison. Duva, who now runs Main Events, was once the publicist for the company when it was in its infancy and run by her late husband, Dan Duva. Back then, all the major metropolitan newspapers had a boxing beat, and coverage was much more expansive than it is today. “I sound like I’m talking about the good old days, here. But yeah, there was this whole band of guys. You heard stories about when they went to the Ali fights in Manila and Zaire. Those guys are – dare I say it – a dying breed.”
“They are a dying breed and they have been for a while,” agreed Donald Tremblay, who is the lead publicist for Duva’s company. “The reason is not because of the writers themselves but because of the bias against boxing by the editors of the daily newspapers.”
Could it be that boxing, with its heavy Latin influence, is looked upon as an ethnic or niche enclave within the sports world?
“No,” answers Tremblay, “I don’t think the editors that reject covering the sport reject it out of any belief that it’s a niche sport or that it’s a Mexican sport. I just think that too many editors are arrogant to believe that people only want to read about what they want to read about. Like I’ve always said to people when they ask me, ‘I don’t like pro basketball, I have no interest in it whatsoever. But if I became the sports editor of the New York Daily News, am I going to stop covering the New York Knicks?’
“But unfortunately – and this is not only my personal opinion but this has actually been told to me by many writers across the country – the editors only see reality through their own two eyes. They cover things based on what they like, rather than what their readership may necessarily want to see.”
Tremblay has been at his post for a decade, and in that time, not only has the number of writers diminished, but getting ink has gotten more and more difficult.
“Yeah, it has gotten progressively tougher,” he says. Tremblay vividly recalls Jay Searcy of the Philadelphia Inquirer, who used his influence to make sure boxing was covered. But once he retired, so did the boxing beat at his paper. “Because he was high on the food chain at the paper, he was able to get a lot of stuff in the paper and the paper was very good for us at that time.
“The moment he retired, that was it for boxing with the Inquirer.”
But to Duva, the problems are deeper than just one writer whose beat is not replenished.
“I don’t think it’s just boxing writers, it’s everything,” she says. “The world is changing, I mean there were no internet reporters, and a few years ago, I had conversations with television networks where they said, ‘Oh, we want to see real press.’ Well, it got to the point where (the internet) is the real press. And I’ve believed that for quite some time.
“The world is changing. And the way news messages were delivered are no longer going to be the norm in the future and I think it’s changing. We have to change with it. While I wish every paper had a beat writer to cover boxing, we’re just going to have to be smarter and find ways to reach people without them.”
And it seems that the writers themselves, are adapting to the change in climate, by looking for new environments to carve out their trade. Kevin Iole, who covered boxing full-time for the Las Vegas Review-Journal since 1996, saw a landscape that was changing. A few months ago he would accept a position at Yahoo! Sports, to cover boxing and MMA.
“Really, the number one thing was I got a chance to go to the largest internet site in the world at Yahoo.com with almost a half-million people coming to the site a day,” said Iole, in explaining his move. “That was very attractive, and obviously, Yahoo has a great travel budget. Dave Morgan, the sports editor there, was at the LA Times for many, many years and had a great reputation and I really wanted to work for him.”
Writers from all realms are making – or looking to make – similar migrations to cyberspace.
“It’s pretty amazing,” says Iole, “I’m getting emails now that I’m at Yahoo from writers that I had known casually over the last 20, 25 years and they’re all emailing me, ‘Hey, who do I talk to at Yahoo to get in there?’ They’re all making contact. I think that’s showing that the internet is going to be the new dominant power.
“It already is the new dominant power.”
One of the advantages of writing for a website is that there really are no space restrictions in terms of content. Also, sites like Yahoo! have much bigger budgets to work with.
Iole says that while he enjoyed his time with the paper, “The one thing that was frustrating for me, over and over, was that there was virtually no budget for boxing. Royce Feour and I covered boxing together for many years and I think between the two of us, we might have made six or seven trips outside of Clark County. Yahoo, I’ve already made that many in the first three months.
“It’s just a different thing, obviously. I’m working for a much different company now than I was then. The travel budget is much bigger. With newspapers, budgets are so difficult these days and advertisers are leaving newspapers and going to the ‘net. And that makes it very difficult for the newspapers to compete.”
Robert Morales of the Los Angeles Daily News has a regular boxing column every Saturday that can be read on several different newspapers. He is a fixture at most of the big fights on the west coast, but he does feel like the last of a dying breed.
“It’s interesting, I’ve seen some of the recent guys who have taken some buy-outs at some major newspapers like Michael Hirsley and Ron Borges; I’m not sure, but that might make me – at only 14 years – either the longest boxing columnist in the country or one of them,” he says. “And I’m not saying that to toot my own horn. I’m saying that to kind of say, yeah, it feels like there are just not that many full, regular, weekly boxing writers around. And it’s kind of scary because I’m sure other newspapers look at that and say, ‘Geez, should we be covering boxing as much as we are?'”
Morales gets a full page for every column. The Los Angeles Times hasn’t run a regular boxing column since 2000 and made the decision to give half of whatever space was dedicated to boxing to MMA.
“Because of the way things are going, I’m kind of bracing myself for that,” admits Morales, who began covering the sport full-time in 1994. It was a beat that he fought for. “I love the beat. I’ve been disappointed in some things that have happened in boxing at times, like I think we all have. But it is my favorite sport. I love boxing. There’s nothing like being at a fight like Corrales-Castillo I or Morales-Pacquiao III, where it’s just insane inside the arena. And let’s face it, if you love boxing, you can’t help but get goose bumps in that situation.”
While the enthusiasm isn’t shared often enough by sports editors across the country, being in a region with such a heavy Latin presence could be a reason why Morales is given the space he is.
“To be honest with you, nobody has ever said that to me, but that would be my guess,” he says. “That’s one of the things that I have kept in my mind because I have had bosses just kind of say, ‘Yeah, y’know, we’re really hoping that you can reach out to the Latin community’ and the Latin community does love boxing. I do think that certainly helps, absolutely.”
Morales would like to cover every significant bout, but again, budget constraints bind him.
“They tell me, ‘We gotta pick and choose our spots.’ We can’t necessarily go to every single fight in Vegas like we used to,” he says. But what’s also changed is that instead of perhaps being at the fight location for four or five days, now, many writers will arrive just a day or two before the event. Morales mentions that the two biggest sports beats for his newspaper group, the Dodgers and Lakers, have had no cutbacks on their travel budgets. But says, “Pretty much everybody else has been affected to some degree.”
This may not just be about where boxing stands on the sports totem pole, but a much bigger issue regarding the future of the newspaper business as a whole.
Morales also freelances for 15rounds.com, something many other writers do nowadays. He recalls a conversation he had with the long-time boxing writer for the Philadelphia Daily News, Bernard Fernandez. “We said, ‘Listen, we have to be prepared for whatever is going to happen in the future with the internet. And we have to watch our backs. So this is a good time to get our feet wet as internet writers. My newspaper group has already said, Dean Singleton, the owner of Media News Corp., he has already told us he plans on putting about 90-percent of his resources towards the internet in the next ten years. So we see what’s coming.”
Iole believes that some of the blame for the lack of coverage of the sport should be directed at boxing itself. He agrees that many editors do have a built-in bias or myopia against the game, but he adds, “The one point they make that is very, very good and I heard this last year, I spoke at the Association Press Sports Editors Convention and I heard it again at the National Association of Black Journalists Convention, the same thing – the fights start too late for east coast and central time zones. That is a legitimate reason.
“But I think they’re missing out on a lot of good stories. And I see that the traffic – now that I’m at Yahoo and I know what’s going on traffic-wise, is very healthy and there’s nothing to be embarrassed about. And while the television ratings or the pay-per-view may not be good, I don’t think that’s showing that there’s no interest in boxing. I think it’s showing that the viewers or readers just can’t find the information.”
Then there is the issue of media rates at hotels, which aren’t so affordable anymore.
“What was it at De La Hoya-Mayweather? It was some unbelievable, phenomenal figure, $400 a night for a hotel room,” recalled Iole, who lives in Vegas. “And Las Vegas, as I knew Las Vegas, prided itself on low-priced rooms, low-priced food and they would make their money back on gambling. And to charge media members, when they’re going to help publicize your hotel – that’s just price gouging.
“Let’s take Golden Boy Promotions, which is doing a lot of business with MGM-Mirage Corporation, they would be very smart to go out and say, ‘Hey, you know what? We will subsidize your room, we’ll charge you $119 a night, whatever the difference is, we’ll pay MGM-Mirage. Because that’s going to help them and that’s going to help the sport they promote.”
But don’t look for that to be implemented anytime soon.
As the 21st century moves on, in the age of Iphones, Ipods and youtube, the question can be asked: just how relevant are the papers, today? Is it that big of a loss for boxing – which perhaps more than any sport leans on the internet?
“To the extent that people still read newspapers,” surmises Duva, who has three kids from the ages of 18 to 24, who are well-read and educated. “I can’t swear I’ve ever seen one of them read a newspaper.”
Duva says she still reads the paper on a daily basis with her morning bagel and coffee.
“In my generation that’s how we got news. That’s how you learned about things. My kids do this online.”
And when she gets feedback from his son on her company’s events, it’s from stories he reads on the world wide web.
“He never says, ‘I saw a story on your fight in the New York Times.’ I don’t think he’s ever going to say that. I’m saying, ‘If I want to reach people in my generation, yeah, we gotta get newspaper stories.’ And for the moment I guess that’s important because they’re buying.
“But going forward? I’m not so sure it is important.”
OK, but what about the polar bears?
