"The End" for Showtime...

No more Mauro Ranello...we should be declaring a national holiday.

 

I enjoyed their final broadcast. Good fights all. Props to the fighters for coming to fight and especially the retirees. That was fun to watch. Morrell looked big and good and scary. Won't miss some of the final broadcast crew, however. What an extended circle jerk that was.

 

Felt genuinely sad watching Showtime Championship Boxing sign off last night. As someone who subscribed to both HBO and Showtime solely for boxing (and indeed subscribed to cable solely for boxing in general), I am really gonna miss them especially with HBO gone.

With the benefit of context, HBO and Showtime brought the big fight feel in a way other broadcasters never have. HBO had thee best production, hands down - but Showtime ran a close second and had a very strong frontline team with legends like Bernstein & Farhood, but also with Mares really growing into his role, and Ranallo (whilst being a marmite character) brought a lot of color and excitement to proceedings. Custer was mostly neutral and solid as anchor too, which is what you need. And of course, the classicism and iconic delivery of Lennon JR - nothing over the top, no yelling, just classic and clear. Faultless.

What do we have now? ESPN is largely unwatchable with it's team treating every match as a showcase for the home fighter - playing to casuals with relentless and stultifying stats, sucking any excitement out of a fight with talk of "dominance" and "masterclasses" relating to compubox stats. Tessitore and Kenny both *could* be very good, but act like gratuitous company men shilling for the a-side. Bradley is clearly smart and could be an excellent analyst were he not trying to ham it up as some sort of loudmouth 'character' for the casuals. Ward is exceedingly hard to stomach with his holier-than-though sanctimonious blatherings, and is also a very partisan observer too like the rest of the crew. It's insulting as a boxing fan to have them tell you what you are watching, rather than just calling the shots as they are. They do an excellent job at making even competitive fights *seem* one sided and boring.

And then there's DAZN. Similarly marketing themselves at a specific audience - a younger, cheesier demographic. Casuals rather than boxing fans again - which is odd given that it's the biggest driver of their platform. The UK team has the potential to be very strong - Mike Costello on commentary with Andy Lee as analyst is excellent - the UK equivalent of Lampley (an old skooler, passionate and mostly fair) and Steward (Andy's mentor. Andy is great at translating what he is looking at and how to explain it). But that's about it for the UK side - Bellew is a bit of a joke and I am unsure as to why they insist on trying to make him a celebrity in the UK. It's a turn off. He's very biased.
The US side is just terrible, not as bad as ESPN, but close. Todd Grisham is the epitome of a company man - once again shamelessly and breathlessly pushing the home fighter and robbing any level of excitement from a fight, trying to sell a scripted narrative. Mannix is similar - better schooled, but cheesy and narrative oriented above all else. Let's that get in the way of the reality in the ring. Mora is smart and a decent analyst but seems more focused on playing his role in some sort of comedy duo with Mannix - a very American and cheesy dynamic. Don't get me started on Ak and Barak - they may be the two cheesiest guys in boxing, period.

I don't want to sound too pessimistic - but I just feel that now both HBO & Showtime is out of the game, we will start to really realize what we are missing, without some of these old traditionalists in the game.

One last thing - Showbox will be what I miss most. No bull****, no bias. Just pure boxing - hype em up a bit, match em tough, see what happens. The team knew they were in the home fighter business, but were more focussed on finding out what they had. Very refreshing - it was very rare that Showbox was a let down. The anti-ESPN in some ways.

 

Good. Now we can subscribe to apps that are dedicated to sports and more importantly dedicated primarily to boxing, instead of having to subscribe to premium channels who focus on movies and TV shows. I liked HBO, but having the fights on there and Showtime was terrible.
Showtime was getting 300k views towards the end when it couldve been alot more on other networks. No ones watching on those channels anymore.

Best move boxings made in awhile

He was one of the worst.

 

Adios. Another one bites the dust.