Was thinking about boxing earlier today (surprise!) and how modern matchmaking has become, relatively, so soft, especially at the beginning of ones career (Well actually some modern fighters are making entire careers out of fighting weak opposition but nobody wants to hear me complain about that) I had a few questions that I managed to dilute out of all my pondering. When did everyone start making the 0, being undefeated, this unbelievably desirable, no, a necessary attribute? This has been a thing since at least the 80's. Remember carefully promoted 56-0 Nino La Roca? That charade started in the late 70's... I'm sure it goes back much farther than that. But when did it become so fetishized? Floyd Patterson ended up fighting an 80-21-4 Joey Maxim before his second year as a pro (Don't forget Yvon Durelle as well) and had been in with stern opposition for a newcomer to the sport from the get go, a veritable killers row comparable to the soft matches prospects take place in today, to build then own resumes. All this from with Cus being there, who was supposedly not shy about potentially soft matchmaking himself. So when was it hardest in boxing, the matchmaking the toughest? Where are we at now?
I recently came to the conclusion that careful matchmaking is exacerbated by day before weigh-ins. Day before weigh-ins result in fighters factoring weight loss into their overall strategy. As a result of “yo-yoing” weight, fighters require more time off between fights to recover from the grind. Plus the practice of keeping known fighters away from off-TV fights means fighters today fight A LOT less than the old days. This explains why a lot of fighters lack knowledge of the subtleties of years past and those who know them, e.g., Duran, Hopkins, Toney, Byrd, and Mayweather make fighting look so effortless. The fewer fights and limited number of TV dates make promoters overly cautious to match their fighters up tough. This is why we hear the terms “high risk/low reward” and “marinate.”
You know why the zero is so important? The title situation is screwed up beyond hell, and people found another way to measure greatness. Mainstream sports fans are all aware that the word champion in boxing no longer means a thing.
One of the main ways they construct the unbeaten records these days is to have the prospects training for specific dates long before the opponent is even informed of the match. Chuck Davey was 37-0-2 when Kid Gavilan exposed him in 1953. He's an obvious earlier example of a fighter whose unbeaten record was protected to keep interest on regular television shows.
I think with top promoter-managers investing in prospects for early career television exposure, the protecting of the unbeaten record became more common and possible. It's a story in itself: the young prospect rising up the rankings, yet to be defeated. Viewers have a basic interest in following that, even if the fights themselves don't often deliver. Prior to television, more of the boxers and their handlers had more pressure to build reputations by impressing the more knowledgeable crowds and being in reasonably competitive fights. They might have tried to get away with the same things but they had more pressure to buckle down and build slowly, with more learning fights, and losses were inevitable. It's far less effort to watch Televised boxing for 30 or 60 minutes in your arm chair than go out and sit in a small hall boxing show all evening, so the television viewer is either more forgiving or less knowledgeable, or both. It's easy to turn TV on to see a boxing match, especially free commercial TV, even if we know it's not a good match. And despite that, the boxer on TV with a 20-0 record in yet another mismatch, is still getting massive exposure and building his name, in spite of any negativity that such poor matches can produce. People might say "Jimmy Bob Palooka is an overrated hype job" but they're still watching him and know his name. But also, just as Colonel Sanders mentions above, the proliferation of "world titles" and "rankings" faciliated the "undefeated" phenomenon to become so widespread. It multiplied the thing several times over. When everyone knows going 25-0 with a couple of wins over respectable journeyman or fringe contenders is easily enough to secure a WORLD title shot, due to so many of those "titles" being in circulation, it makes so much sense to take an easy route as possible, especially since the targeted champion is probably only a couple of fights ahead of that stage himself !
I’d go a step further. Title shots are no longer an end in themselves but merely a potential means to the greater end of maximizing a fighter’s earnings.
All divisions should adopt the tournament style that super middle did and cruiser is doing. It's the best option to really gauge where a fighter is at. Kudos to the fighters that are willing to take on all comers. Lomachenko, Kovalev, Ward, Wlad, etc. shame on the Wilder's of the world
Wilder and his ilk, resume padding buffoons, are a cancer to the sport, that should have been surgically removed a long time ago. They try to promote the illusion that their fighter is some devastating monster when the fact is that his record is so empty you could knock on it and hear an echo.