Boxing is so dead!

I used to record those shows, too, and a lot of them sucked. Old, fat Tony Tubbs outjabbing journeymen. Considering USA had shows on all year, the few gems you actually remember were surrounded by a lot of garbage.

How many weight divisions had title unifications this past year? We saw them at Light Heavyweight (Beterbiev-Smith). Middleweight (Golovkin-Murata). Super Welterweight (Charlo-Castano II). Welterweight (Spence-Ugas). Super Featherweight (Stevenson-Valdez). Bantamweight (Inoue-Donaire and Inoue-Butler).

A new unified Lightweight champ (Devin Haney) was crowned and defended successfully in Australia in front of 40,000 fans.

There were three heavyweight title fights (not counting the interim heavyweight belts) featuring :
Tyson Fury, Oleksandr Usyk, Anthony Joshua, Dillian Whyte and Derek Chisora.

The two Fury UK fights were fought in front of 90,000 and 60,000 fans respectively. (I remember when Larry Holmes used to defend against 2,000 people in the tin shed that was dubbed the Las Vegas Sports Pavilion.)

The #1 pound-for-pound fighter and unified Super Middleweight champ (Canelo) lost in an upset trying to win his second light heavyweight strap (Bivol) ... and then Canelo beat the unified Middleweight champ (Golovkin) at Super Middle.

We saw the highly controversial unified Super Lightweight title fight where a hopeless underdog Catteral seemed to knock off the unbeaten champ (Taylor) ... only to scandalously lose on points.

We saw Deontay Wilder return with a bang. We saw Joe Joyce take apart Joseph Parker. We saw Andy Ruiz and Luis Ortiz mix it up. We saw the emergence of new stars at lightweight and heavyweight in Frank Martin and Jared Anderson.

Looking back, there seven unifcation fights in the lower weight classes, a new unified world light weight champ was crowned, a new unified super lightweight champ probably should've been crowned, and there were three hugely attended heavyweight title fights ... oh, and Canelo fighting Bivol and Golovkin ... so basically 14 major title fights ... an average of more than one major event a month ... on top of all the other title fights and non-title bouts that took place (did you forget Brieidis-Opetaia already?).

It was a pretty damn good and "full" year for boxing.

But there hasn't been a big fight in a couple weeks or so ... so Boxing is dead (again). That is, until Saturday, when everyone will be buzzing about the Gervonta Davis and Jarron Enis fights.

People bore easily these days.

 

I am not bored with boxing I just miss those days when I used to record boxing on VHS. Just reminiscing about those days. Boxing is in trouble though IMO. I am not sure that they are going to keep boxing in the Olympics in 2024/2028. So many young athletes will miss Olympic glory in boxing if it gets canceled. I will really miss following Olympics boxers. I started watching boxing in the 1968 Olympics and followed George Foreman from Olympics Gold Medal to the Heavyweight Champion of the World! =D

 

January is always dead and frustrating. I'd say this January is actually a little better though?

 

When is the next big fight even coming up? Inou and Caneloe are the only ones keeping this sport alive ATM. great fighters with no one to really fight.

Crawford is going to be 37 for christ's sakes with his best win being..Brook?

 

It's funny, as a few years ago the major complaint was that every division had like 7 champions what with interim/regular/super belts being handed out like presents, and no one unifying was killing boxing. In the last few years we've had an unprecedented amount of full unifications.

I think the main reason, is that people don't like having to pay for everything.

I mean, there's legitimately more boxing available than there's ever been, it's just it all comes with a cost ( streams notwithstanding )

I think the issue in the long run will be a slowly dwindling audience, who's going to pay for something they're not into? There needs to be a readily available supply of free to air boxing ( or at least as part of a larger regular subscription/cable package ) to replenish fan bases, and keep new blood coming to sport.

 

Boxing was around before the Olympic boxing tournaments were televised or existed and boxing will be around if Olympic boxing isn't included in the Olympics or isn't televised. We'll just likely see more Dual Meets, like they had 50 years ago on ABC and recently with the World Series of Boxing.

I was just reading an article from a 1960s Ring Magazine where the writer was discussing the cancellation of the Wednesday night or Friday night fight telecasts. One of them.

Back then, boxing people believed that was a good thing. They thought televised boxing hurt the local clubs and made boxing worse. They thought television would be the death of boxing and fewer fights on TV would be better.

Then, in the 7Os, boxing exploded on television and you had Holmes making title defenses in front of 2,000 or 3,000 people in the Caesars Palace Sports Pavilion, but millions were watching at home. And when network TV stopped showing boxing, fans thought that would be death of boxing.

Then cable picked it up. And people who lived off network boxing thought it would die because not enough people watched boxing on cable. (Now you're pining for that era.)

Now we've got the ability to watch every card on a show live in our homes and 90,000 and 60,000 people are showing up at events, and unifications happening all the time ...

And people are bored and say it was better some other time.

Long story short, boxing fans tend to be complainers and most never think they are living in the best era until it passes.

Boxing had a great 2022. And you can spend hours watching boxing this Saturday if you miss it. You can even record it if you like or download it afterward.

 

Then maybe you should stop waiting for Crawford to have a big fight and move on from him.

People get obsessed with one fight happening and tend to ignore everything else.

 

When people complain about "what big fight is coming up" I just think back to years like, for example, 1990.

The year started with what was considered a collosal joke of a PPV - Foreman-Cooney. What a joke. Nobody cares The boxing mags crucified it. ESPN treated it like another example of "the death of boxing " And HBO had nothing going on until February, when they were going to bore us all with a ridiculous mismatch with Tyson-Douglas, which nobody wanted to promote in the US so they stuck it in Japan. But that didn't matter anyway, because after that Tyson was going to fight Holyfield, and he wasn't even a real heavy and would probably only last a round or two like Michael Spinks and Carl Williams.

And the biggest network fight was Jorge Paez against a guy with practically no fights who couldn't punch in Troy Dorsey, so why spend any time tuning in to that garbage. NBC must've really had no budget left for boxing if they were trying to give us crap fights like Paez-Dorsey.

Nothing was happening until March and the Chavez-Taylor fight. Which might be good. Who knows.

Point being usually the fights you tend to have fond memories about aren't the BiG fights or the over-hyped fights. We had a ton of big fights in 2022 and some seem to have forgotten them already.

You remember the fights you didn't really think much about that turn out to be a lot of fun.

If you like boxing, watch it.

If you sit around waiting for someone to tell you what's supposed to be good, you end up waiting a long time for stuff to pan out that probably won't live up to your expectations anyway.

 

There are some extreme talent around. And there has been plenty of talent for years. The reason why this sport is dying in usa is because the ratings suck. The reason the ratings suck is because the fans do not get the fights that they want bc boxers are afraid to fight anyone dangerous or their promoters are. And the ratings are just in the toilet.

 

If I could I would fatboi

 

Nah, Viktor Postol.

 

Actually....over Gamboa?

 

This is true. After the pandemic there's nothing to watch at all.
Fury just fought Chisora for the 3rd time. Wtf

 

Yeah him and Postol were at least the same weight. Ricky Burns would probably be second.

 

So pretty much the same as 100 years ago then! HW champ Dempsey didn't defend his title even once in 1922 - where fans instead were treated to the 18th episode of the Wills-Langford saga. Wtf!