Boxing's diminished view in the public eye..

I think Tank is pretty popular.

 

Im meeting 10 mates 2mora who i would describe as casuals.....i will ask them to name 10 boxers and 10 UFC fighters. Im betting they WONT be able to name even 5 UFC fighters.
Boxing DOESN'T make enough money from mainstream so thats likely as to why many arent very familiar with who's who. In the UK the media/newspapers etc arent reporting much on the american guys u mention like Porter, Spence, Crawford etc unless they are facing a UK boxer.

 

Too much politics.

in politics I include too many “world titles”,the best dont fight the best,lack of rivalries due to “endless marinating”,robberies,etc.
Its a **** show nowadays.

 

Garcia is very popular and he’s a lightweight.
(If you consider Garcia a fighter)

 

Im a huge sports fan in America...

Everybody knows Floyd. Just about everybody knew Pac.

Small amount know Canelo.

WWE fans and UFC fans know Fury but that is all.

Nobody knows Wilder. Only off the Sportscenter clip of Fury licking him.

Boxing doesnt cross over here in the states.

 

The problem is really exposure. I was a kid in the 80's and boxing was on normal TV. In our household my older brother and me were the boxing fans but the reality is the big fights the whole family watched like Hagler v Hearns or Hagler v SRL. So it was completely different as it was more le an event and the general public knew who all the fighters were and they were household names. It started to change in the UK in the mid to late 90's when Sky started to get exclusive fights. and it slowly moved from normal TV to sattelite. The problem is only the boxing fans moved over as it was now a PPV model that changed it forever. The problem now though even if you moved it back to normal TV today the problem is not that many people watch normal TV anymore. I mean I haven't for years and I know many who just use streaming services or watch things on youtube. So something like boxing is just competeing with a lot more things these days compared to when I was a young lad. I still think it has a decent following in the UK as we can see that when there's a dust up between British fighters but you need that competition and rivalries to pull the casuals in

 

U must be ages with myself. Early 80's u had boxing on most sundays with jim watt and reg gutteridge....remember watching chavez destroy rosario and another must watch boxer for me had arrived. Watching all the hagler fights on ITV and big Frank and Harry Carpenter on the BBC. Then we had all the domestic rivalries in the 90's of Benn, Eubank, Watson to name but a few. As u say Sky rolled into town and the boxing world was changed forever in the UK

 

Exactly right. you also has Friday and Tuesday night fights on channel 4 which used to be on pretty late. but gave you all the upcoming fighters in the US. Thinking about it we used to get a good amount of boxing content in the day. There was no internet so you got the news from newspapers. or the few mags you could get back in the day like The Ring and KO but these were always a little behind with results.

 

Some of the major problems as i see them:

The sport is fractured. Too many weight classes, too many belts, too many sanctioning bodies. From the casual fans' perspective: there's only one super bowl champion, there's only one Stanley Cup Winner, there's only one winner of The Masters, how can there be 4 champions at the same weight class?

The sport is run by the lawyers and managers of the top fighters. Too many safe matchups are made for champions in order to protect their record of 0 losses, the best are rarely fighting the best.

There is no current larger than life superstar, no Ali or Mike Tyson. Canelo really isn't much of a personality, at least for american viewers, and most casual fans couldn't even tell you the names of either heavyweight champ.

Limited access to fights, and an all around mess as to where to watch what fight, and too many different subscription services needed to watch them all. DAZN, ESPN+, and Showtime all require a separate subscription. Maybe FOX, NBC, and ESPN occasionally show some fights?

 

Depends where you are in the world

In terms of current boxers here in the UK, Fury and Joshua are household names. People know Wilder from the Fury trilogy too, and there’s decent name recognition of Usyk, Whyte and Chisora as people naturally gravitate towards heavyweights

Somewhat surprisingly, I’ve noticed more casuals over here are starting to talk about Canelo. There is a small subsection of people here who know Tank and Lomachenko, but as far as current boxers, that’s pretty much it

 

horrendous decisions have hurt boxing,its obvious there is corruption

 

If you want to talk a dimished sport, start a thread on Major League Baseball.

 

A few years ago Channel 5 in the UK had something I think it was the maxi nutrition light heavyweight tournament , just domestic blue collar fighters , i think Bob Ajisafe won it in the end, so it kinda shows you the level it was
But wow were some of the fights good, it was a compelling tournament on free TV , started as an 8 man tournament I think so every month or so there was a card on, I wish there were more things like this because it was accessible, entertaining and regular , without these 3 things boxing has no hope of coming back to the mainstream really, outside of the genuine crossover stars like a Fury, where a lot of people know who he is and maybe even his story without ever having seen him fight