By Scott Kraus – June 19, 2009 – Here’s a quick little quiz for you: can you name the last sport to die in the United States?I’ll give you some time to come up with an answer.
When the UFC exploded in popularity beginning several years ago, countless curmudgeonly old hacks, along with a new wave of Internet writers inspired by the excitement of a burgeoning sport and a complete lack of accountability (hey, sounds like me!), found new fuel to the seemingly age-old argument that boxing is a dying sport, now doomed to be overtaken by mixed martial arts.. The trouble is, among all the wild written haymakers thrown the way of boxing, I have never read anything that actually described what happens when a sport dies. What will the death of boxing look like? Will there be a funeral? And perhaps most importantly (at least as far as Don King and Bob Arum are concerned), who gets the inheritance?
Apparently, I live in a very different world than the writers inspired to eulogize a sport that consistently draws thousands of people to arenas and millions of television viewers around the world on a regular basis. In my world, sports fans enjoy a variety of sports. Personally, I am a boxing, baseball and football fanatic (with a particularly special love for boxing, of course) and I also regularly follow, to various degrees, basketball, college football and basketball, MMA, tennis, and golf. Most of my friends follow many, if not all, of these sports, as well as some others. I am not necessarily a fan but I understand that soccer is rather popular in some parts of the world.
Those who prophesize the demise of the sweet science seem to live in a world without nuance. Their thought process is as clear as it is flawed: if one combat sport is increasing in popularity, then the established combat sport must be decreasing in popularity. Thus, eventually MMA will overtake and “kill” boxing. I assume, following this overly simplistic logic, that these scribes dumped their TVs when they got computers and destroyed their mailboxes when they got email. How disappointed they must have been when eight tracks replaced vinyl.
In fact, boxing and mixed martial arts are very different sports. I shouldn’t have to write that because it should be laughably obvious, but the tone and tenor of the debate between supporters of each sport necessitates spelling things out… very… carefully. Boxing and mixed martial arts have some surface similarities. Each sport features two fighters competing against one another under the watchful eye of a referee. Each sport is divided into a set number of timed rounds with breaks in between rounds. The winner in each sport is either decided when one fighter is unable to continue due to legal force by his opponent or when a panel of judges decides the winner once the timed rounds have been completed.
Of course, basketball and soccer also share surface similarities, for example – two teams of a set number, two goals on each end of the playing field, scoring determined by putting the ball in the other teams’ goal, and the team with the most points at the end of the game is declared the winner. In the past two decades, basketball has exploded in popularity in Europe and European players like Pau Gasol and Tony Parker enjoy the pinnacle of success in the NBA. Somehow I doubt that once-rabid soccer hooligans are now sporting Kobe Bryant jerseys instead of AC Milan gear. Even if they are, I suspect they did not have to give up their passion for soccer to make room for hoops.
Besides, if the myopic writers who trumpet the demise of boxing could quell their xenophobia and take a look around the world, they would see that several countries have already demonstrated that boxing and MMA can enjoy simultaneous popularity and success. Japan, for example, enjoys both a vibrant boxing scene and highly successful MMA promotions. This is because boxing and MMA are fundamentally very different sports (again, understandably obvious but needs to be said). Boxing is predicated on striking. MMA incorporates both striking and grappling. Boxers fight in rings, while MMA fighters fight in rings or cages. Boxers wear eight- or ten-ounce gloves; MMA fighters wear four-ounce gloves. Boxers are limited to striking with their gloved fists, while MMA fighters can (depending on the rules of the organization) use gloves, elbows, kicks, or knees.
Different sports. Different appeals. With absolutely no reason why they cannot co-exist.
To address the quiz I posed to start this article: trick question. I cannot name a sport that has died. Google is no help either, as a search for “sports that no longer exist” turned up a few articles about Olympic sports that are no longer part of the Olympics and a whole slew of dead ends. So I guess that sports don’t really die, but it may be time for the death of a tired concept for boxing-bashing columnists.