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

All of that is valid, but at the day's end the largest contributory factor is that you can always tell a casual fan of combat sports by how obsessed with knockouts they are - particularly if they utter the cringe-worthy tell-tale proclamation "that is how fights are supposed to end; points are just in case we don't get one".

KO junkies believe (and I'm not even sure this is a correct assumption; in terms of anybody having done any serious academic study to see if there really is a significant gap with the lighter weights) that heavyweights stand a higher statistical chance of putting each other to sleep, and that by virtue of that alone they are somehow the "worthiest" of attention. Never mind the reality that you can have a terribly dull fight end in a sloppy one-haymaker lights out and have it be not half as satisfying as watching two flyweights go to war from bell to bell over 12.

 

I watch lightweights and welterweight a good bit but i'm not gonna lie I usually stick to watching heavyweights and middleweights the most. Their just the most consitantly interesting to me.

 

I started watching boxing (very casually) with Ali-Liston (2) and watched ONLY heavyweight bouts initially. The first non-HW bout I watched was DeJesus-Duran. That was pretty much it for non-HW bouts till after the thriller in Manila.

In the late seventies, I began watching lightweights, welterweights, and middleweights, as well as HWs.
I still found the HW division to be the most exciting in the era of ALi, Frazier, Norton, Foreman, Holmes etc, but with the Fab four and the likes of Pryor, Arguello, Boom-Boom etc., my outlook broadened. But I was still only interested in LW and up. And I was still more of a casual fan of the sport.

From the time of the Prince, Morales, Barerra, Pac, Marquez, Floyd etc, I started becoming interested down as far as 122 lbs.

Which is where I'm at today. I know there are exciting fighters below eight and a half stone, but my interests don't tend to go there, though
Inoue is making me a fan of bantam.

We have a range of 'fandom' on here from Casuals...posters who watch maybe a dozen fights a year and could maybe name a dozen current big names....all the way to the Hardcores like the Springs Toledos and the McGrains and the IBs, who make the sport a significant part of their lives.

I would place myself midway between the Casuals and the Hard cores, a Hardcore light or a heavy-duty casual, take your pick.

The top boxing talents in the sport at the moment...Loma, Bud, Spence, Pac, Canelo, GGG, Rigo, Inoue etc are NOT heavyweights.

But the HW division is still what interests me most and that has been the case for nearly all of the period where I've followed the sport.

There is something special about guys like the K brothers, AJ, Deontay, Ruiz and my favourite gypsy....climbing into the ring and unleashing all that firepower.

A little off topic maybe, but to answer the question, I don't see a racist (nor Nationalist) bias here. It's just that the the HWs capture the general public's attention to a greater degree than the little fellas.

 

You're not American are you? I'm guessing English. I was pretty much speaking from an American point of view....maybe elsewhere it was different. I read Ring back then and always looked at the international sections in the back pages. I wanted to see those fighters, but there was no chance of it usually. I know I've read quotes, none that I have around at the moment though unfortunately, from people in the business claiming that Americans had no interest in lighter weight classes or non-American fighters. I always thought it was nonsense. Given a chance, I think Americans would have certainly enjoyed the lighter weight classes especially when compared to the majority of the ultra-boring heavyweights of that era I'm mostly talking about (first half of the 80s). But we were just given the same rotation of uninteresting fighters on tv.

 

Bite your tongue, lad !!!


Irish.

 

LOL...Sorry!

 

Hold on there Rope-a-Dope. In the 1980's there was no internet, so Americans could not view these fight in general. Don't blame Ring Magazine, they gave praise on what they had to go on.

For whatever reason, the 80's had terrible mismatches when a fighter from Asia took on a USA talent.

Few care about the extreme lower weights. If they fought guys above their weight and won, maybe then it would make a difference, yet they seldom do. Psychologically speaking, giving up 3-5 pounds doesn't sound like much, but in boxing it matters.

 

Definitely not.

 

That's true, but it didn't stop some of the major boxing magazines from writing off all Asian fighters, sight unseen. The Ring had Asian contributors, but apparently some of their other writers didn't even bother to read what those people had to say.

 

Among the Latin American fighters the macho image was a lot of times part of their persona, Duran, Camacho, Benitez, Trinidad, Mayorga just to name a few. You don't see too many Latin American heavyweights. Oddly Andy Ruiz is like a big teddy bear personality wise.

 

And that's because many of the Asian based talents back then hardly fought the best North American based fighters and often were confined to their own country where losing a decision was unlikely.

You could say they were the best in their region of the world, but to be the best in the world you have to fight opponents outside of your backyard.

I do think there were some seldom seen talents in Asia. We can appreciate them now. Boxing to be should start at flyweight. How many grown men North America are under 112 pounds? 108 and 105 to need to fight the best out there, as the talent level and title opponents are often slim pickings.

 

In terms of what, putting asses in seats? Eh... I've been to plenty of small hall shows with zero heavyweights to be found anywhere on the bill. ShoBox, ESPN, and even HBO put on countless programs over the years with championship main events in other weight classes where there wasn't even so much as one HW 4-rounder on the non-televised undercard.

Boxing could survive just fine without it. Thrive? Maybe not. But then, boxing hasn't thrived since before most people here were born (and before some people's great-grandparents were) - and that isn't to do with a decline in the HW division so much as just interest waning in the sport among the general public as team sports gradually took center-stage.