Unlike nearly every other professional sport in North America, boxing runs year-round. Therefore, you might think it would have an easier time holding the attention of its fans. However, an old but increasingly popular pastime has emerged to keep all those baseball and football nuts busy even in the off-season. I’m talking here about “fantasy” betting pools.
For the uninitiated, fantasy pools are essentially a form of gambling on professional sports. But this type of gambling doesn’t involve covert phone calls to your favourite bookie and broken thumbs when you can’t cough up the necessary dough. For the most part, these pools are legal, mainstream, and safe, in that the required outlay is minimal. Some people play purely for fun. Unlike regular gambling, which is more or less a solitary affair, fantasy gambling can be something of a social undertaking. You and your friends get together and see who is the best prognosticator. Or you get on-line and put your skills to the test against thousands of other players, with pride and prize money on the line.
Every major team North American team sport (baseball, football, basketball, and hockey) are popular with fantasy players. And the industry is growing at breakneck speed. It even has its own trade organization now, called the Fantasy Sports Trade Association. Last month this group released a set of figures related to the number of fantasy pool players in the United States. According to its research, 8.5 million people are currently involved in football pools, while another 3.5 million are into fantasy baseball. Several million others play in basketball and hockey pools. By other estimates, these are conservative numbers.
So where is boxing in this picture? It is not a major sport anymore, but surely if there is money to be made in this racket, it would do well to hitch itself onto the bandwagon. Unfortunately, the mechanics of boxing do not mesh well with the usual brand of fantasy pooling. As such, there is a real danger that it will become increasingly marginalized in a rapidly-changing sports landscape.
Statistics are what fuel these fantasy pools. Participants select “teams” of players from all the clubs in the relevant sport. This can be done through a draft, in which picks are made in a pre-determined random order, or by selecting one player each from several different “groups”, though the draft is by far the more popular method. Teams are organized into leagues, and scores are tallied based on the statistics produced by each player. So in baseball, for instance, hits and runs get you points, as do other stats. In football, touchdowns and yardage are the main metrics. The formulas for converting these stats into scores vary depending on the type of game being played. But in the end, the fantasy player who’s team has accumulated the most points is declared the winner.
Fantasy pools have been around for a while. So-called “Rotisserie” baseball leagues have been going since the early 1980s. But in those days it was tough to get all the necessary statistics, and leagues were much tougher to operate. All of that changed with the advent of the World Wide Web and the explosion in personal computing technology. Computers are designed, essentially, to store and process information. Meanwhile, quick and generally reliable telecommunication has resulted in nearly instantaneous transmission of relevant game-time information. All of this has combined to make what was something of a niche pastime into a major and growing industry.
Fantasy boxing does exist, in a very limited form. Search on-line and you’ll find small pockets of die-hard fans that have formed their own leagues. Scoring is usually based on the outcomes of specific fights, with more weight given to stoppage victories as opposed to decision wins. The computation is simple. And that’s the problem.
The fact is that boxing does not lend itself well to statistical analysis. The action is fluid and continuous. The required skills are complicated in the extreme to master and execute, yet the end result is simple and basic. The job of a fighter is to hit the other fighters. There are no secondary goals, or at least there are none that are easily quantifiable. A football team has to gain yardage before it can score points. A baseball team has to get runners on the bases before it can accumulate runs. A boxer has to do a million little things right in order to get into a position to land punches, but nothing as discrete and absolute as, say, a completed pass or a stolen base.
Of course we do attach some statistics to a fighter and fights, but they are all problematic. Individual records mean little to nothing. A quick search on boxrec.com will turn up countless fighters with apparently scintillating records that never set foot outside their hometowns and never met anyone you’ve ever heard of in the ring. Even with legitimate fighters, records are a bad way to measure ability, because the best in the business only step in the ring a few times a year. Manny Pacquiao, for instance, fought only two times in 2005, and one of those ended up as loss. John Duddy, on the other hand, went 7-0. It’s obvious that the best “pool” fighters would not even come close to reflecting the actual best fighters.
The only other major statistical measure in boxing is punch stats. The amount of punches a fighter throws and/or lands can reflect to a certain degree their ability to fight. But these number only tell part of the story. A solid defensive fighter will throw much less than a guileless brawler. The defensive fighter’s connect percentage may be better, but that’s not for certain either. Besides, there is much more to good defensive boxing than efficient punching. There is more to being a wide receiver in football than gaining yards, as well, but not much more. Moreover, the unreliability of punch stats is reflected in the fact that most fans forget about them once a fight is over. And they are rarely mentioned by writers covering fights, unless they reflect something especially unusual. In short, they do not carry nearly the same weight and power as statistics in other sports.
All this talk about statistics may seem a bit much. Who cares if fantasy boxing is unworkable? The problem is, this sort of thinking disregards important developments that every sports fan need to recognize. Fantasy pools did not spring up out of a vacuum. They are not merely another annoying trend that dropped in out of left field, like the pet rock or the Macarena. They are, in fact, just one of the more conspicuous by-products of the changes taking place in the business of professional sports.
It wasn’t that long ago that many prognosticators were declaring that pro sports were headed for tough times. Player salaries were shooting up at the same time that mainstream entertainment choices were expanding and becoming increasingly “interactive,” to use the favourite buzzword of the time. How were old-fashioned ballgames going to compete with video games, personal computers, home theatres, and the like? Kids stayed indoors and played Nintendo (this is going back to the pre-Playstation and X-Box years, remember), they didn’t go outside and play sports. How could a business increase its operating costs several fold while its fan base was sure to shrink? It couldn’t. At least, that’s what the doomsayers were saying.
But, as usual, the doomsayers could not see the entire picture. Yes, we live in an era of information and entertainment overload, but pro sports has found a way to survive in this new environment. There are a number of reasons why it has been able to do so, but I don’t have time to get into everything here. Suffice it to say, though, that fantasy pools play a prominent role in this counter-offensive.
Not that poolies have been consciously mounting this charge. But fantasy betting can certainly be viewed as an outgrowth of the ways professional sports are now digested by the public. In an age of mass distraction and endless information, statistics have a way of cutting through the muck. People may not sit down and watch all four quarters of a football game or all nine innings of a baseball game, but they can go on-line (where they probably are already) and load up on the latest figures. I would take this argument further, and suggest that fewer and fewer people actually care about the nuances of the sports they supposedly follow. Instead, numbers rule.
It is a fact that athletes are increasingly valued for the statistics they produce. Peyton Manning, for example, is viewed by many fans to be the most talented quarterback in the NFL. Manning puts up great numbers, but he is also a notorious playoff choker, and has failed even to get his Indianapolis Colts into the Superbowl, let alone win it (playoff stats are usually ignored in fantasy pools, incidentally.) Meanwhile, New England Patriots QB Tom Brady, who is more of a clutch player in the Joe Montana mould (though not as good as Montana), is reviled by poolies because he doesn’t produce nearly as much in the way of yards and touchdowns as Manning. Yet he has led his club to three Superbowl wins. As fantasy football become increasingly popular, the opinions of its participants become increasingly widespread, distorting the perceptions of all sports fans.
This is all bad news for boxing. A fight does not produce the cornucopia of digits that come out of football, baseball, basketball, and hockey games. The damage this could do to the sport’s exposure cannot be underestimated. One only has to visit one of the major sports news sites on the World Wide Web, such as ESPN.com or CBS’s Sportsline, to understand the impact that fantasy betting has already had on the ways in which the media covers sporting events. The major media empires that front these sites have jumped on the fantasy bandwagon, and have tapped into potentially incredibly lucrative revenue streams as a consequence. How they have been able to do so without actually advocating on-line gambling is worth exploring in some detail.
The fantasy sports pools on these sites are often free to enter. This means that anyone can start a league or participate in a league without having to pay a dime. By doing so, however, you only get the bare minimum of services, and you are not eligible for any of the prizes on offer. Prizes usually include vacations and the like, which make them a different animal from the sorts of payoffs you get by winning bets, at least in the minds of those setting up these games (and who can presumably still sleep at night.)
As for the services, they typically come in the form of packages of information and/or on-line tools that help in the setup and operation of the leagues. So, say, if you cough up thirty bucks when you take part in an ESPN fantasy league, you benefit from real-time updates to your score as they games are played. To obsessive-compulsive poolies, this is enticing stuff. Another common type of service involves the delivery of pre-season information and rankings prepared by folks who supposedly possess guru-level knowledge about this sort of thing. Others give you tools that let you better manage your league, further increasing the efficiency of what is essentially a data transmission system. The character of these services also reflects the informational nature of fantasy sports betting in general. The more die-hard a player you are, the more information you want, and the more you are willing to pay for it.
These websites are making some serious cash with these services. According to a report in the September 18th issue of the Pittsburgh Tribune, CBS saw its fantasy football revenue jump 59 percent between 2002 and 2004. It also said that the amount of players involved in its games numbered in the “millions.” And the popularity of fantasy betting has increased substantially since that time.
So here’s the thing: say you have a sports-related website. Yours is one of thousands of similar sites on the web. Competition is tough. Revenue is hard to come by (ad revenue isn’t the golden goose many think it is.) You have a limited amount of space on your front page in which you can grab the attention of the itinerant web surfer. It only makes sense, then, to devote a large chunk of this space to subjects that are a) popular, and b) can potentially make a lot of money for you. In specific terms, this means, more and more, that you provide extensive coverage fantasy betting leagues and all related sports.
Where does boxing fit into this picture? Well, it is already an unpopular sport. Moreover, it doesn’t translate well into any sort of fantasy betting. Even if fantasy boxing did have something of a following, it wouldn’t be enough to justify a major sports website devoting any space to it. Not only would its popularity pale in comparison to that of other sports, it would also be harder to piggyback any sort of revenue-generating services off of it. Since major fights are few and far between, the need for live and easily-accessible information would be minimal. There are hundreds of professional football and baseball players, but there are only a few dozen major fighters. In pure supply and demand terms, the business model wouldn’t work.
Think about all these trends long-term. Imagine that fantasy pools keep increasing in popularity, while more traditional means of following professional sports, such as actually sitting down and watching the games (or attending the games, something that is reserved for a privileged elite in this era of astronomical ticket prices) fall out of fashion. Big media juggernauts race to keep pace. There is no room for stragglers. Those that can’t compete in the new universe are shoved aside. Boxing, which is already well off the radar screen of many sports fans, is not equipped to win this sort of fight.
Boxing is an incredibly rewarding sport for the dedicated fan. A good fight can be watched hundreds of times, with each viewing revealing something new about the action. There is nuance and subtlety and complexity. Unfortunately, these traits are not so desirable in the modern world of professional sports. Football and baseball are nuanced and complex as well, but this isn’t appreciated as much as it used to be. However, in a world of non-stop information, they still manage to stay afloat. Boxing, unfortunately, can easily get lost in the noise.
