MMA VS Boxing How important is the 0

for the win!

 

I think it has to do also with how the announcers build up the fighters. they tell you about them, and their skill set (even if it's inflated) and if they lose they praise the winners and give you the impression that the loser lost to a monster.

in boxing you don't get that, it's so and so is no good etc.

 

its stupid, tyson said it himself that there is second chances in mma, its like when roger federer first started his career he wasn't the tennis god that he is today, he was good, but he wasn't amazing, it's like promoters don't understand that god forbid, a fighter improves throughout his career and learns from his losses.

 

And that was a crap fight with a dodgy result that never lived up to the hype!

IMO with very few exceptions, you cannot be a great boxer until you have lost a fight. Even the few boxers who never lost in their primes, either retiring with a 0 or losing when shot, I bet would have become better if they had at least one loss. Losing, if you are dedicated, pisses you off and makes you work even harder, makes you look at your mistakes and figure out what went wrong, makes you realize you have to prepare and work even more to avoid that painful feeling again in the future. A lot of the great fighters upped their game after an unexpected defeat or two. E.g.

Joe Louis
Manny Pacquiao
Muhammad Ali
Marvin Hagler
Sugar Ray Leonard
Bernard Hopkins

Arguably quite a few great fighters who won everything for a long time, didn't have that edge once they finally got exposed later in their careers. They could afford to coast, so once their skills deteriorated a bit or they met their match, it was too late to improve.

All a zero says is that you didn't fight enough good opposition.

In MMA it's rather different because there are more random variables where you can lose, you fight more different styles, you will always eventually meet someone who is better than you at something. It's just much harder to avoid a defeat, so people are more forgiving.

 

Yeah but you can't blame promoters. A promoter follows the money, and the money comes from delivering to fans what they want. If fans didn't overrate the 0, promoters wouldn't either.

Ultimately fans need to get more educated, but that's hard when boxing is restricted to PPV nowadays, which is killing the sport in the long-run.

 

Hatton picked and chose fighters like Tszyu, Castillo, Mayweather and Pac, not exactly a weak set of opponents. He seemed to be quite popular with the fans too, despite losing his two biggest fights badly. Isn't that pretty much the definition of a game contender?

As for Calzaghe, what do you think he should have done to give more back to the fans? He did try to match Hopkins in the early 2000s but got turned down, and Jones moved to LHW before Calzaghe even won the lightly-regarded WBO title. The fact is he was only a big draw in Wales/UK, and was rightly regarded as a tricky southpaw - lots of risk, little reward for guys like Hopkins and others to fight stateside. And until the Lacy fight, he was hardly minting money even on his home turf. When he finally did get the big fights, he took them on foreign turf and he won them. So where's the beef? Who did he duck that was willing to challenge him? When did he turn down a fight the fans and his opponent wanted, in order to take an easy payday?