boxing has always been all about the money and fighters without enough financial backing have always got ****ed over. Did the sharks care about primo carnera, **** no they didn't
Yes, you know Minotauro Nogueira, called Big Nog by the americans ? He almost gradueted in the law school...IIRC. His father had an Accounting Office or something like that.....but they (he and his brother who also is a fighter) were good at fighting....
I guess some people just like to fight I am a big fan of the UFC as a business, in terms of emerging sports companies their organisational strategy is second only to the IPL(cricket), and is incomparable if compared to the WBA ect(**** only knows what their long term strategy is, it may well be to kill boxing). i don't watch too many fights alone tho tbh, it can be exciting, but ground matches aren't really my thing.
When the crap UFC is now much more popular, you know something's wrong. I've said 'ad nauseum' how difficult it is to compare fighters from different eras, a 2000 Dempsey and a 1920 Klit being my biggest example, but the downslide is much more than that. I've virtually blown off boxing except for the occasional 'big' bout. Here's the problem IMHO. 1) To many 'governing bodies'. You've got 4-6 champs in every division for pete's sake! When the WBA & WBC got into their 'pissing match' in the early 70's I could live with that to a point but that was the beginning of the downfall. 2) New weight classes 'invented'. Now we've got a potential champion at, what?, every three or four pounds??? "Money talks and bulls**t walks. I'm 60 and, as a kid going to the barbershop, I knew who all the champs were AND all the contenders. Should have stuck to the Fly-Bantam-Feather-Light-Welter-Middle-LH-HW format, OK maybe a 'Cruiser' addition may have been OK. 3) Back to point 1, a few years ago I saw the Top ten contenders in the big 4 governing bodies. 40 fighters! ONLY 4 of them were on every list??? So we have 36 top ten contenders? Total BS? I could say more but my favorite sport as a child might as well be thrown into the trashheap of history IMO. My somewhat weak $0.02
I think we can pretty much all agree on one thing...the alphabet boys and their plastic titles have contributed a lot to boxing's current state.
No, but the fact is, if it's antiquated or less fashionable, then he's less likely to be a boxer .... he's less likely to consider it. There's no doubt that conditions in the poorer neighbourhoods of America and Europe have improved since the golden age of boxing. Okay, so we look to places like Latin America. Exactly. That further proves the point I'm making. The options of crime and boxing have always been present, and some guys have tried their hands at both. But now the option of boxing is weaker relative to other things (including criminal enterprise in the slums of Latin American countries).
It's less about the trainers, imo, it's more about the promoters. There are plenty of guys who can box and teach boxing into Latin America. I think people tend to overrate the mythical "old school trainers". Maybe Brazil, a rising world economy, with the World Cup and Olympics coming up, will host the next golden age of boxing. What America had back in the golden age, was not just a load of kids from the slums, but hundreds of full-time promoters and fight clubs and venues. On a scale from very small to huge stadium extravaganzas. Or you could see boxing at the fairgrounds and carnivals. Of course, those were different times when live local enterainment was a bigger thing. Nowadays there's more choice, more fragmentation, even outside the affluent western world.
