The Boxing is Dead Masterlog Hall of Shame

There never was this lost golden age, that's just people having selective memories or no memories at all. This usually comes from Americans & Canadians because they lost dominance (especially at heavier weight classes) that they once had with the entry of all that talent that was kept out due to communism. They even come up with copes about how all their heavyweights are running around with a ball in NFL or NBA as if those weren't popular or paying big money in the 90's when you had Bowe & Holyfield. One might as well point out that through a majority of this so called golden age, all the potential Klitschko's, Beterbiev's etc sat in the amateurs because they weren't allowed to be pro's

If people have a problem with corrupt promoters & decisions, they should remember that at one point during the so called "golden age" the mob literally ran Boxing for years & no I don't think Eddie Hearn or Bob Arum are anywhere as bad as Frankie Carbo

Combat sports will always be niche sports in an age of affluence where society is soft & life is easy, just have to make peace with that

From the viewpoint of millions of Boxing fans in the former communist bloc, this is their golden age because finally they can become pro's without having to flee their countries. For a Japanese Boxing fan, what better than an era in which Inoue, Ioka, Nakatani, Tanaka, & Teraji are active at the same time with interesting prospects like Tsutsumi Hayato coming up

Boxing isn't going anywhere because as a wise man once said:

"Fear not, when all the kid games have faded to lore, people will still fight with their fists for money."

 

Back in the day, Ali had to go to Zaire to get a good payday

Now the boys simply hop on a plane to Saudi Arabia

Boxing will always find a way - and a paymaster....

 

whatever it is that consistently attracts this broken sport to idiots with money to burn, I don’t know

 

Dana White couldn't even halt the complete collapse of Japanese MMA after buying out the #1 MMA promotion (Pride FC) in the largest MMA market (Japan) at that point in the world. UFC was 2nd best at that time. How would he save Boxing?

He talked about launching Zuffa Boxing for years & do you know what he ended up launching in the end? Slap fighting. I am not kidding, google Powerslap

What Dana White & UFC are great at is ripping off the fighters so badly that Don King looks like a saint in comparison. I think last year they paid around 13% of the revenue generated, Boxing promoters pay around 56-80%+. This is why you see all these random UFC fighters calling out Boxers for Boxing bouts, they are looking for that Boxing payday

This is also why there is a federal anti trust class action lawsuit against UFC that is set to go to trial in April 2024 with the class comprising of 1214 former & current UFC fighters

The judge who issued the class certification actually cited Boxing history to suggest that the UFC is a monopsony. Here is a screenshot of the remarks where he cited US vs International Boxing Club case of 1950's where the US federal gov't stepped in to stop what they saw as a monopsony conspiracy by James Norris & Arthur Witz to take control of Boxing

https://ibb.co/3MZ1cfs

Most casuals don't even care about MMA, they watch UFC instead. Have you heard of a Boxing fan saying they will watch Top Rank or Matchroom?

Do you want Top Rank, Matchroom etc all to come up with their own title belts which no one not signed with them can fight for? For Eddie Hearn to have more fans than Naoya Inoue (I seriously think Dana White has more fans than Demetrius Johnson, 1 of the MMA GOAT's)?

Boxing & the model that it has evolved (which puts the fighters at the center) has demonstrated long term sustainability where as the collapse of a promoter (Pride FC) was all it took to completely gut the Japanese MMA scene. The same thing happened when K1 Global collapsed, Kickboxing went through a big downturn because there also you have promoters making up their own belts & promoting the brand (UFC, K1, Glory) not the fighters similar to how WWE promotes its brand

Do you know what the current big topic in MMA is?

Dana White was asked if he would copromote with PFL to put on the biggest MMA fight to be made (Ngannou vs Jon Jones) & he called the reporters question dumb, the reporter an idiot & asked why he would do that

Fedor Emelianenko widely regarded as one of the greatest MMA fighters of all time & P4P #1 at the time UFC bought out Pride FC never signed with UFC, 1 of the sticking points being UFC's outright refusal to copromote with M1 Global (Fedor's promoter)

Instead the UFC went after Randy Couture (#2 HW in consensus rankings after Fedor & UFC HW champ) when he tried to leave UFC to make the Fedor fight happen. Tied him up in litigation & Randy ended up testifying in front of the US Congress about fighter rights. Just around that time Brock Lesnar was given a title shot at UFC HW belt with a 2-1 MMA record & 1-1 UFC record with the hope that he would beat an old Couture while selling a lot of PPV's for UFC due to his WWE stardom & that's what ended up happening

Meanwhile Eddie Hearn's Matchroom is copromoting with Tasman Fighters so that Jai Opetaia agreed to sign with Matchroom

If you think highly of Dana or that he has any solutions to offer for Boxing, go listen to Rob Maysey & John H. Nash

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its been dead for decades now.

 

Boxing is dead in the water right now. It's not like it used to be, now there's MMA, people have no reason to watch corrupted boxing.

 

Special needs poster?

 

Boxing will continue as a sport, just not a very well run one. No other sport suffers from as much widespread corruption, alongside other issues including the best not fighting the best, terrible ranking systems, there being too many champions, and cherry picking to list a few.

These problems are not new to boxing, they’ve just got worse in the modern era. So the sport isn’t really dying, it’s just been consistently dreadfully managed.

 

Nothing biased about pointing out the fact that he couldn't even save the sport which had a massive market in Japan at that point, so how is he gonna save Boxing?

One Yakuza scandal & a promoter failing was enough to make the bottom fall out of the entire sport in the third largest economy on the planet? That didn't raise any questions to you about the MMA model of promoting the brand over the fighters, promoter controlled belts & rankings, but somehow Boxing which has outlasted the catch wrestling craze (in many ways the precursor to modern MMA), the era of outright mob control under Frankie Carbo (analogous to the Yakuza scandal with Pride FC), the eras of vocal calls to ban it (e. g. AMA leading the charge after Mancini killed Kim), & the communist era where pro Boxing was suppressed in a huge chunk of the world needs Dana White to "save" it

How come in the same country of Japan, Boxing has had a major presence since the fighting Harada days at least & now it has Ioka, Nakatani, Inoue etc all fighting at the same time? I mean Boxing's model is so bad right, but how come it was MMA that ended up becoming nearly irrelevant in Japan over 1 Yakuza scandal & a promoter failing?

You are delusional in your claims about "Boxing is falling", we have been hearing this same song for 120+ years & usually its from people sitting in US & Canada. Meanwhile the reality is that 100's of millions of people got the opportunity to box as pro's in nearly a century & the Klitschko's showed that they didn't even need the US

Good luck on Dana White convincing Naoya Inoue, Kazuto Ioka, Choclatito, Estrada etc that their weight classes don't even deserve to exist (he threatened to get rid of the 125 lb Flyweight class from UFC). Good luck on him somehow outhustling Teiken, Ohashi & taking over Japanese boxing in Japan, & repeating that all over the world with Sauerland in Germany, Queensbury & Matchroom in UK etc

Hell even a cutman like stitch Duran had too much self respect to work with UFC & you think that somehow Boxing is becoming "irrelevant" (no proof offered) & Dana will come riding on a steed to take over & all these top Boxers will just humiliate themselves in front of daddy Dana & beg for that Dana white privilege. Good luck with that

You might be surprised by what's coming next year when the antitrust lawsuit goes to trial because I read through the Judge's remarks & he isn't too pleased with the UFC "model" that you are hyping up. If the UFC loses, it is not just potential massive financial damages but injunctive relief is on the books as well which means an end to UFC's contracts as you know it. I would worry more about that if I were you & start following the case instead of worrying about Boxing's imminent "death"

BTW the UFC model wouldn't even be legal in American Boxing. It would violate the precedent set in the case between US federal gov't & IBC in the 1950's where the Supreme Court essentially dissolved the IBC for practices similar to the UFC by citing violation of anti trust laws. The Ali act comes in the way which several Boxing promoters already pointed out. When there were rumors that PBC was gonna create its own "belts", 1 of these sanctioning bodies sent them an open letter pointing out that a promoter doing that would be violating the act

 

It's never true, but I've never felt like it's more true either. And that's for me to deal with, with my therapist.

 

I just need to get a therapist. But the only one I want is Robin Williams and he gone.

 

Top post. I've been making similar points since I've been here... responding to the "golden agers". You know, when the US dominated boxing, especially in the HW div.
From the viewpoint of millions of Boxing fans in the former communist bloc, this is their golden age because finally they can become pro's without having to flee their countries. Yes, but most entirely overlook this as they criticize the 2000s era as "weak". Hmm, what a coincidence, just when US dominance was fading, the era became "weak"

You brought up an affluent society then in the next paragraph the recent success of Japanese boxers. I'd like to make the point that Japan is among the most affluent nations in the world but that hasn't stopped them from producing top talent. What's the US excuse for declining in boxing? Too affluent (even the poor in the US are richer than billions in other nations)? The lame other sports argument?

 

I wasn't saying affluence explained decling of US dominance in heavier weight classes with that sentence. Rather that was a response to these people always crying about how Boxing was bigger than Baseball at 1 point & how that proves their point about how Boxing is dying. Well when that was the case, there was no TV, smartphones, & internet (which allow you to tune in to what you want at a moments notice) & none of the dozen or so other sports competing for peoples attention & life was a lot harder (so the public probably had a better appreciation for Boxing without constant cries for bans citing safety)

I do think affluence isn't exactly the best for Boxing success & I think if Japan was less affluent it would be producing even more Boxing talent but that's not exactly what one should wish for. We know how many Boxers came from very harsh lives of poverty & if you look at the trends within US Boxing, is it a coincidence that Irish, Italian, & Jewish Americans produced top talent in Boxing in the 1st half of the 20th century when they were new immigrants mired in poverty. As these groups became more affluent, all that diminished because it makes far more sense to go become an accountant or a lawyer rather than risk CTE, coma, & death for money.

I think it was Johnny Kilbane who said if someone could show him a way to make the money he was making Boxing, he would stop Boxing. He was part of the early 20th century Irish American immigrant stock which saw Jimmy Mclarnin, Jim Braddock, Mickey Walker, Gene Tunney, & other big ATG's

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Supposedly 200,000 people came out to welcome Kilbane in Cleveland on St. Patrick's day after he won the FW title off Abe Attell (a Jewish American Boxer), many of these people would have been Irish Americans

As for the loss of US dominance in heavier weight classes, I never bought the NFL/NBA crap excuse, & it is partly explained by the fact that all those Eastern Euros kept out of the pro scene were suddenly allowed to become pros, & more international competition means its harder for 1 country to dominate. We also have to remember that Eastern Euros being kept out was the perfect recipe for US HW dominance because they can get as big as Westerners where as Japanese, Koreans, Thais, Filipinos & Latin Americans rarely do (so even though all these were allowed to be pro Boxers during the cold war, it was unlikely that they would produce HW stars)