Imagine if the New York Yankees played just 15 games a year. Or the Dallas Cowboys putting on the pads just three or four times and the Lakers or Celtics the hitting the hardwood about a dozen times a season. If that was the reality, it would be hard to imagine those iconic franchises (and their leagues) having the kind of transcendent appeal they enjoy.
But that?s what is essentially taking place in the sport of boxing, where the game?s best and brightest perform no more than a few times a year.
If you look at the Yahoo! Sports pound-for-pound list (which is compiled by Kevin Iole and voted on by a panel of journalists), that includes Manny Pacquiao, Joe Calzaghe, Juan Manuel Marquez, Israel Vazquez, Bernard Hopkins, Antonio Margarito, Rafael Marquez, Paul Williams, Miguel Cotto and Ivan Calderon, since 2005 these ten fighters have combined to fight a total of 84 bouts, which averages out to right around two fights a calendar year.
These fighters saw their stature grow from young prospects (who fight anywhere between six and eight times a year on various undercards and smaller events), to young contenders who then began to pick their spots (performing maybe four or five times a year as they up their competition) to their final transformation, where they become marquee names who perform solely on the premium cable outlets – who have a finite amount of dates – or on major pay-per-view events. It’s at this final plateau that fighters? activity slows to a crawl. Nowadays, a fighter who can squeeze in four fights a year is considered Henry Armstrong-esque. Out of the current guys mentioned above, only Williams has had a year recently where he fought four times – which was in 2006, when he was still just a burgeoning young prospect. That year he faced Sergio Rios, Walter Matthysse, Sharmba Mitchell and Santos Pakau. For several reasons – one of them being the reluctance of many fighters to face him – Williams since that point has had a total of four fights as his stature has grown within the industry. But doesn’t a guy like this (who has problems selling tickets and attracting a fan base) need to be more active?
It wasn’t always like this. There was a time before television completely ruled the day and exclusive contracts signed by the networks with fighters turned the biggest stars into semi-annual performers, when boxing’s most popular figures would fight almost every month, come hell or high water, with or without television, regardless if it was a championship fight or not. They would stay busy in between the big fights, either building upon their home base or in other major arenas across the country. It was during this era that boxing was as relevant as any other sport in this country.
That day has passed unfortunately, but you’d like to think that the industry as a whole can find a way to get their most popular entities out in front of the public more often. Sure, things have changed, and some of it for the good, where fighters who get cut or knocked out automatically go under medical suspensions. Or fighters like Vazquez, coming off his grueling war versus Marquez, along with a detached retina, simply needed the rest. That’s perfectly understandable, but you get the sense that Archie Moore is rolling over in his grave as he sees just how inactive today?s fighters are. It’s not realistic to expect any fighter to be that busy anymore (perhaps Buck Smith was the last of a dying breed) but there has to be some middle ground. The dearth of regular and consistent outings from the game?s supposed stars has hurt everyone in the business.
“It’s really a function of where the marketplace has gone, and the revenue streams for the fighters became so great that they tended not to take the risk to get in the ring unless the money was a certain level,” explained Todd duBoef, president of Top Rank, which handles the likes of Pacquiao, Margarito and Cotto. “There are so many things that became restrictive on all of us for fighters to fight. Networks didn’t want a guy to fight prior to 90 days before. It was everything. I think there’s a saying, ‘Out of sight, out of mind,’ and I think if you want to become incredibly popular and global and you want to be sharp and in tune and great in a physical sense, you have to fight regularly, especially in your peak years. As you get older, north of 33 or 34, you may want to take a little less time in that.
?But I think that we have a habit – or the market has a habit – of not having fighters fight as regularly as they should be.”
Boxing has gone from being mainstream to niche through the years. Outside of perhaps Oscar De La Hoya, Mike Tyson and George Foreman, there have been very few, if any, figures that can be considered household names to the general public.
“I think it has hurt (the business) that the common person doesn’t know who these fighters are,” du Boef says, on the effect of stagnant fighters. “I mean, us in this small little niche world know a certain amount of fighters and we know who they are because it’s on the internet, or in Ring Magazine, Yahoo, ESPN or Maxboxing, it’s everywhere. But that’s just a couple hundred thousand people and I think we need that globalization of the sport to be popular, by the regularity. If a guy?s fighting every 60 days, I think by accident people are going to hear about him, he’s going to make noise. I mean, when Ali lost to Frazier, he fought every month. Bob (Arum) and Ali went around the world, fighting every month. Every month they’d book a fight, book a fight, book a fight. And that’s what it was. When Sugar Ray Robinson fought Jake LaMotta they’d fight three weeks after that. Or they’d book an arena in Detroit and he fought there and a month later he was in Chicago. And a month later he was booked in Philly. I think there is something to be said for that regularity and that amount of attention and eyeballs to that product.”
For the record, Ali, after dropping a 15-rounder to Frazier on March 8, 1971, fought three more times that year – twice at the Astrodome in Houston, Texas against Jimmy Ellis and then Buster Mathis, and he finished off the year in Zurich, Switzerland versus Jurgen Blin. The following year he would fight five times.
Robinson, after losing to LaMotta, not only avenged that loss three weeks later in February of 1943, he actually had a fight in between those fights, as he decisioned Jackie Wilson in ten at Madison Square Garden. It was part of a year that saw him fight six times. The year before he was out there a whopping 14 times. The next year he would put up his dukes five times. During this period he fought in historic venues like the Boston Garden, Comiskey Park, Madison Square Garden and Chicago Stadium.
But duBoef’s point remains strong. These fighters fought; they didn’t just sit around for months and years chasing a single payday, and they weren’t hindered by any network contracts. When ABC, NBC and CBS were in the boxing business, the boxers and promoters may have made less money than they do with HBO or Showtime, but they were also exposed to a much larger audience and were more active than today?s prizefighters.
?This is completely anecdotal – there was an article, I think last Sunday,” recalled duBoef, “in the New York Times on Howard Stern and it talked about Howard Stern moving from basically over-the-air radio to the satellite radio. And as much as he did it for the money, it really hurt him. He hurt his vast appeal; people don’t talk about Stern like they did. People don’t know about Stern. So while it economically benefited a lot of people, he went to a smaller audience and he’s in a no-man?s land, now. And I think the comparison was Jay Leno or somebody, saying that they didn’t want to be a Stern and go to this small niche market. I want to keep in the terrestrial stratosphere, where I am common and people know who I am and my awareness is there.
?I think what happened with boxing is we went the Howard Stern way. We went to the pay cable networks and the talent wanted the money and everybody wanted the money and we went that way. And we hurt the general awareness of our brand.”
Perhaps the last world-class fighter to be truly active on a consistent basis was James Toney, who in his days as a sleek middle and super middleweight from 1991 to 1994, fought 24 times under the Top Rank banner as he bounced from HBO to ABC to pay-per-views to ESPN and even some shows that weren’t televised. It was during this stretch when Toney honed his skills and developed into one of the game?s true craftsmen. It was then that ‘Lights Out’ was at his best. But Toney and Top Rank also had other platforms that simply do not exist today – such as ABC – and he was willing to be flexible with his paydays. He and his management understood that there was a great disparity between the licensee fees provided by HBO and ESPN.
But he was willing to fight.
“He was fighting on ABC, he fought on ESPN. We had a lot of outlets,” duBoef said. “He was a great fighter and he was willing to fight anybody and it wasn’t about greed.”
Oftentimes getting both the promoter and the fighter to agree on a long term vision is a fight within itself.
“It’s part of a partnership, it’s a part of figuring out where you’re going to be aligned and figuring out what your gameplan was,” explained duBoef, on convincing fighters and their representatives to see the big picture plan. “Our job, as with any fighter, ‘This is what we’re doing today but let’s look 60 days from today and another 60 days from today and let me go and sign this fighter. I’m going to put him on your undercard and build up a fight so we can fight him in another six months.’
“And that’s what it is. That was our job, our job was to set those stories up, set that lineage up, to set up the calendar and I think the advent of fighters becoming their own promoters kind of minimized that whole game plan because at the end of the day, the fighter who’s his own promoter doesn’t care about signing another fighter in a weight class he’s going to fight eventually and build him up. They want to get the most money on that night – and that’s it. So you don’t have that.”
And fighters who set up these shell companies generally only do events when they get a date on either HBO or Showtime, once or twice a year.
Oscar De La Hoya, who is perhaps the only fighter to have retained his incredible popularity despite his long layoffs, had perhaps the last real active period of any boxing superstar in 1997 when he fought five times. To put that into context, since 2004, he has participated in a grand total of six bouts. Because of his appeal and his pay-per-view prowess, Top Rank didn’t need HBO to clear up dates; instead they went on pay-per-view four times that year. But the reality is that no other fighter can do that, and unfortunately, most will only perform when the networks give them a date.
Has the paradigm been changed irrevocably? “No,” says duBoef, without hesitating. “I don’t think anything?s forever. The paradigm was changed drastically in a number of ways, but I don’t think anything is forever changed. I think eventually guys are going to be sitting around waiting for fights to come to them and hope that their phone rings. But in actuality, people are going to have to be more pro-active, like promoters, like managers and fighters, to be able to make fights.”
Or become Winky Wright.
Perhaps the market will correct itself in the future. Maybe if the money being paid out to the fighters on the pay-cable networks becomes less exorbitant, then the fighters themselves will feel the need to work more. But right now, the sport has fighters who don’t really fight all that often.
“They’re part-timers right now,” duBoef says. “They’re part-time fighters. I mean, that’s basically what it’s becoming and because of that, they suffer. And people say that there are no stars or people don’t know who they are, well, the reason why is because a lot of guys have been spoonfed a lot of money and just wait for the money. Just wait, wait, wait.”
MY MARKETING PLAN
I’ll say it again, if you haven’t read Thomas Hauser?s latest piece, ‘Memorandum to Ross Greenburg: HBO 2009’ I suggest you do so immediately.
But one thing that really caught my eye was the part about how HBO rolled out a marketing plan to promoters that would have had their fighters brought in to pose as students in front of De La Hoya, the professor, which I guess flew like a lead balloon.
OK, I actually thought it was a decent idea. And being good friends with Ross, I’m always willing to help him and HBO out. Hey, that’s what friends are for. I got a few ideas to improve on their original concept.
Here goes…
– Have Oscar surrounded by all the other boxers in the back of a limo, opening up a suitcase filled with cash as their eyes all bug out. Uh, well, maybe not this one….
– Or how about him having a backyard barbeque at his Big Bear training camp, grilling up deer meat for everyone? Y’know what, on second thought…
– Alright, alright, he’s at the gym with all the fighters, getting ready to work out. But, before all this, he breaks open a big box and he starts handing out ‘The Ring’ sweatsuits and hoodies. Ehhh, not really feeling this one….
– I got it, I got, how bout him doing a fashion show where he models…uh, you know what, forget the whole damn thing.
Hey, I tried. What can I say, I’m not very good at this.
SHOBOX
ShoBox, which gets back into the swing of things this Friday night when Leonilo Miranda faces Orlando Cruz, has begun to put their first quarter schedule together. On February 6th, Andre Ward faces Henry Buchanon, with Johnny Molina in the opening bout. And then February 27th sees the return of cruiserweight king Tomasz Adamek. However, he will not be facing BJ Flores, who has backed out of the fight.
But the show, which is scheduled to take place at the Prudential Center in Newark, New Jersey, will go on, according to Main Events head honcho Kathy Duva. Main Events has cut a deal with the new arena to stage six events this year.
BOXREC
To see just who the above-mentioned pound-for-pounders have fought since 2005, click here.
FINAL FLURRIES
Speaking of Flores, I hear he will be one of the rotating in-studio analysts for ESPN2’s ‘Friday Night Fights’….I’m hearing that Vivian Harris is being mentioned as Victor Ortiz’s next foe….It’s looking pretty good for Robert Guerrero to return on January 24th on Margarito-Mosley undercard…..Just my opinion, but Yuriorkis Gamboa is more sizzle than steak. Also, I now know what Odlanier Solis means in Spanish – Lawrence Clay-Bey….Still, great to have FNF back…..Funny, but as I see the HBO schedule for 2009, I don’t see Jermain Taylor on it anywhere……Can you believe the AZ Cardinals are in the NFC Championship Game?….Folks, I’ll say it again, ‘Friday Night Lights’ is the best show on TV. If you can do your friendly neighborhood web-writer just one favor, please watch this when it comes on NBC in a few weeks. I need at least another season of the Dillon Panthers and Co……Why is Charles Barkley taking a leave of absence from his gig on TNT? Seriously, I say let him drink on air and say whatever he wants (and of course give him a designated driver – we want to be responsible here). Tell me that wouldn’t make for great television….
