Were boxing fans always so disrespectful to the smaller weight classes?

Big punchers are overrated and beloved by casual fans. The higher the weight classes, the bigger the punches and the more 1 punch knockouts and crazy reversals you see. Ergo a stigma has been created by casual fans who are ignorant about the history of the lower weights. Some fans simply hate them because they know a heavyweight would beat them. And in their eyes that means they're not worth the time of day.

 

Without the lighter weight divisions in the time period (indeed in the 80s too) the UK would have been screwed, so certainly people brought up in that generation have a ton of respect for them divisions.

 

I love the lower weights. They produce the greatest fighters H2H IMO, and they have some of the best action packed bouts aswell.

I think Magri was pretty loved in the UK though. Obviously not as much as Minter, but he was like and well regarded. The fighters who are still consistently disrespected / forgotten are Asian and Thai boxers.

 

By interest, who is your favourite lower weight boxer?

 

The heavyweight division has been the glamour one since the bare knuckle days, so yes, even in the 19th and 20th centuries it could be said the majority of fans DKSAB, evidenced by their perennial collective obsession with the absolute crappiest weight class.

 

I've often wondered, actually, if the reason the Classic forum set mostly discusses heavyweights is because there's a much greater wealth of print available on them from the old days (because they were, then even more than now, far more popular than smaller fighters) - or if the individual posters here, on average, despite this being a supposed bastion of refined minds and discriminating taste compared with the General (....) actually prefer that HW garbage.

I think it might be a bit of the dog wagging its tail, and some vicey-versa.

You do have some in here like @McGrain and @roughdiamond who routinely show love to pugilism's littler folk of yore, but then, in far greater abundance, you have plenty of this claptrap:

 

Today we all put up the pay preview, to see two heavyweight contenders slug it out, then we get much more pleasure watching two flyweights that we never heard of on the under card!

 

Then it turns out the Flys are world champs.

 

You can summise it in one word.

Casual.

 

Super Feather and below is where 75% of my time and attention go at this point in time....on the rare occasions I venture back to the HW division I quickly realize even in the best HW fights why I don’t spend a lot of time there anymore lol.

 

It depends on which fans. Latino fans always like lower weight boxing. Asian fans like the extreme lower weights as they participate in these matches in greater percentages.

Speaking for myself, and the fans I know, the vast majority of them don't care about boxing below lightweight, UNLESS it a great match up. I'm not saying the skill level isn't there. I'm saying it is full of small men, many of whom are non-American. Most people like sports athletes that are larger than life like Leborn James or Tom Brady. I'd want to be like them many think but who really wants to be 5'4" tall 115 pounds? I can appreciate the lower weights for what they are just like I can appreciate women's tennis for what it is. You can get a great match at bantamweight! I'll watch it.

Then again those at the lowest ends of the scales even the best in the world at that weight usually would not rate four 4 weight classed above and would get badly beaten six weight classes above where they are. So in that context they really are not kings of their sport. IMO, the addition of multiple weight classes has hurt lower weight boxing.

That's the issue if you want the straight dope.

 

TV had this belief that Americans only wanted to see big American fighters. So we were subjected to televised fights involving the likes of James Broad Ax Broad and David Bey on a regular basis, but almost never exciting smaller foreign fighters.

Also, the boxing magazines were highly biased against lower weights. Especially 115 and 108, which some refused to even recognize in the 80s, even though those weight classes included great and/or exciting fighters like Jung Koo Chang, Khaosai Galaxy, and Jiro Watanabe at the time.

There also often seemed to be a little...or a lot...of racism against the lower weight classes due to them being dominated by non-Americans and non-Europeans.