25.03.06 – By Dan Scog: In every sense of the word, boxing is America’s true national past time. Tell the average sports-fan to talk about baseball and you’ll hear about how the Yankees played last week, how Clemens pitched yesterday, or who’s going to get traded. You most likely won’t hear them drone on and on about Mickey Mantle and Babe Ruth with a nostalgic tear in their eye. But the opposite is true for boxing.. The average person on the street speaks about boxing in past tense. No matter how you want to separate and rank the eras, the one thing they all share is that they enjoyed more popularity and mainstream exposure than in recent times.
As a Ring-Magazine subscribing boxing fan immersed the culture, you might find it easy to disagree with me. But realize that it doesn’t give me any pleasure to dump on the popularity of boxing. I’m simply noting that as boxing enthusiasts we’re getting the shaft: stories about boxing are about as common on ESPN as tell-all critiques of Disney on ABC News. Getting your boxing updates from any major network sports program? Forget it.
Most people may take this relative slump at face value and accept it as a reflection of the heavyweight division which has become as synonymous with garbage as “pound for pound” has with Floyd Mayweather – you wonder if the description will ever be separated. But just for the sake of argument (and I’m sure there will be plenty) let me make some more radical suggestions that might help the sport’s PR.
There are too many governing bodies and thus too many belts. Few would argue this, but I list it first because even though it’s hard to change – it clearly hurts the sport. I remember seeing Evander Holyfield on Jimmy Kimmel Live! a few months back and he was asked who the current heavyweight champion is. Before Holyfield could halfway explain why there are technically four different champions Kimmel had already lost interest in the answer to his own question. This pretty much sums up how most of America feels about the situation. Granted there’s nothing more inspiring than an undisputed champion draped in multiple belts – but shouldn’t three suffice? The WBO is considered more mainstream than ever and I shudder to think what would happen if some of the other lesser known organization belts become part of an already overcrowded medium. It’s hard to set up fights and it’s harder to establish a clear champion. The reason why the champ makes the belt nowadays is simply because there are too many belts. With fewer belts a champ would have had to work hard before wearing a belt and thus would have justified his holding of it – rather than justifying a belt so meaningless that we could buy our own at a local Target.
Personally, I feel that corruption is seemingly out of control. The general public is well aware of this, I fear, and as such will often associate even modern boxing with “the fix” or a level of rigging that is usually reserved for “pro” wrestling. Worse yet, in my opinion, this is more to blame on the ethics of a few boxing promoters – whose business practices don’t stand up to even the vaguest of scrutiny – than the fights or fighters. However, the boxing world has always been wary of regulation and it really shows. Boxing may be the only sport that can shamefully boast an exploitation rate similar to that of the recording industry. I’m not saying we have the FBI investigate every fight, but I think a crackdown on the financial and paper end of boxing should be welcomed with open arms.
Finally and most importantly I want to suggest that boxing needs quality refs as much as it needs quality fighters. I don’t want to get sidetracked by mentioning specific fights, but I think everyone should be able to instantly recall at least a handful of fights were one or both fighters were allowed to get away with murder without so much as a warning. Forget about Vitali and Lennox. What are we going to do when Jay Nady and Joe Cortez retire? Hell, I’ve been missing Mills Lane as it is. My point is that a bad ref in boxing is not like a bad ref in baseball. Another man on base or a strike that should have been a ball is lightyears away from the difference between a TKO stoppage and brain damage that can result from a blind ref in boxing. Putting the safety of the boxers as a number one priority is something that is echoed through most of the boxing community, but it’s not put into practice near enough. I love a slugfest as much as the next guy, but I’d rather see more refs err on the side of caution than see more of what happened to Leavander Johnson, Kevin Payne, and a host of unnamed others.
Not to say that every case is that of a bad ref, but the point is that the fact we can do more to increase the safety of our fighters and haven’t done it yet is inexcusable. This is what I care about most. For example, if the NFL has been smart enough to incorporate instant replays then boxing of all sports should make review of instant replays mandatory viewing for refs. Even though reliable statistics on injury and death associated with sports are hard to come by (for obvious reasons that a major sports organization wouldn’t want to shout these facts from the mountaintops) I still believe that boxing is in no way the most dangerous sport. But when an incompetent ref is presiding without the highest qualified physicians and the best in medical technology at ringside then it might as well be a fight to the death. This, more than anything else I can think of, hurts the sport. It reflects terribly on the sport when an amateur boxer (who is frankly at more risk due to the absence of regulation) dies or suffers brain damage. Can you imagine what it would do for boxing if a superstar boxer like Oscar de la Hoya died from internal bleeding immediately following his next fight? You can bet everything you’ve got that there would be a rush to pass more safety/regulatory legislation for the sport in his honor. I say let’s do it now so we don’t ever have to deal with something like that. The boxers with the biggest hearts are often compared to the gladiators of ancient Rome, but in reality they are the most talented athletes in the world – all sports considered – and they deserve better protection than the Colosseum would have afforded.