What happened to the popularity of boxing from the 70s to today?

I think all of the different organizations (WBA,IBF,WBC and WBO) and feuding promoters did a lot of damage to the sport. Watered down titles and champions that don't fight the best available.

Look at MMA. Most of their champs have multiple losses on there records because they fight the best available just like in boxing's heyday. Hell LaMotta and Robinson fought 6 times! No one looked down on fighters with double digit losses because fighters were so active in those days and they took tough fights.

I would love to see one sanctioning body with single title holders per weight class but it will never happen.

 

Just answered this in another thread:

-Four or more champions per division X 16 weight classes equal hundreds of champions who aren't champions of anything.
-Screwjobs, screwjobs, and more screwjobs.
-Converted football and basketball players instead of real boxers who make a science out of it.
-No amateur programs and boxing not being taught in school due to our having a soccer mom culture in this country.
-Self perpetuating cycle of TV wanting nothing to do with boxing because of its decline, thus continuing the decline.
- Best champions from other countries.

 

The 70's had free tv,...and much better champions. All the giants were there on hand in the 70's....Ali, Frazier, Foreman, Young, Norton, Foster, Conteh, Galindez, Saad & Eddie Mustafa Muhammad, Monzon, Valdez, Briscoe, Griffith, Benvenuti, Napoles, Locche, Duran, Arguello, Lopez, Gomez, Zarate, Olivares, Canto...etc.,....absolutely no comparison.

 

What happened? The sport has grown and the talent pool has never been more global.

There's more fighters and more fights generating more money today than there was 40 years ago. In just one example, there weren't enough 200 pound fighters to supply talent to two divisions in the 70's. There are now.

The problem is that many people only view boxing through a U.S. lens, so the domestic decline has given the impression that the sport is dying because the names on top aren't as familiar or easy to pronounce, and not as much top talent comes from the historic American pipelines like it used to. There's a sense of xenophobia to it.

It's also not as convenient to watch fights in the U.S. via the traditional mediums of that era- ie, free over the air tv.

Naturally, being the classic section, this isn't a popular place for that stance.The nostalgia fiends can get their fix; just remember that in the 70's, plenty of older fans missed the good ol' days of the WWII era greats and didn't think much of that respective present era, either. Only they at least had an argument- there were fewer fighters and fewer fights as TV wrecked the club fight circuit and fewer kids signed up post WWII. The difference between that and today is that the foreign competition wasn't in a state to capitalize then, so most of the big fights still usually had at least one American in them.

 

I think part of it was the migration of boxing from network tv to cable and pay-per-view. I remember when I was about three years old, you could still see big-name lower weight fighters like Sugar Ray Leonard and Hector Commacho on ABC's Wide World of Sports, but by the time I was about twelve, big fights were strictly an HBO affair even for middleweights, let alone heavyweights. When I was a about six, I saw Meldrick Taylor fight some guy named Glenwood Brown on network TV, and that seemed like a rare treat. (Actually, I think maybe a cousin taped that one off HBO...)

Also, the 70's are right around the time that Eastern "martial arts" came to be heavily featured in Hollywood entertainment, which are about as authentic as Panda Express "Chinese" food, and I suspect this gave a lot of people absurdly unrealistic ideas about what hand-to-hand combat (and by extension combat sports) should look like. I know a lot of my childhood friends thought boxing looked boring compared to Jean-Claude Van Dam's ballet and Steven Seagal's limp wristed girl-slapping.
(I thought Seagal looked like Eddie Munster trying to get out of an invisible straight-jacket.)

 

Care to back any of your assertions? There was no trace of any argument or evidence in the whole of this post. Of course that in and of itself doesn't mean you're wrong, but it does mean that as of yet you've made no case whatsoever.

 

The difference between now and the 70s is that now, thanks to satellite/cable TV and Youtube, boxing is accessible to everybody.

Back in the 70s, I remember reading about how Locche had gone to Japan and defeated the hard-hitting Fuji... and had looked quite incredible! Another one of my favorites from that time was Olivares, who also sounded a bit special, when I read about him.

But being from Denmark, I could only read about these boxers in various boxing magazines (my only window to the boxing world), and never imagined, that I would ever be able to catch even a glimpse of great fighters like that. You can imagine my excitement when, several decades later, I was able to watch these boxers (and many others, of course) on Youtube for the first time!

Boxing today is so much easier to follow, than "back in the day"... but once again most posters here are only looking at things from an American perspective. Ok, so they aren't able to watch big-time boxing on free TV any longer... and, sure, many of the world's best boxers now originate from outside of the US. But why would this automatically mean, that boxing has gone to ****?

Since the 70s we've seen a big influx of pro boxers from former communist countries - resulting in a huge, international talent pool. With far more fights taking place, worldwide, than 40-50 years ago. How anyone can think, that this has resulted in boxing hitting an all-time low, I'll never understand.

 

are you really questioning the fact that boxings talentpool is more global today??

 

very good Points!

 

I don't answer stupid questions. My previous post was unequivocally clear.

 

Lets be brutally honest: pro Boxing never made it into the Mainstream. and rightfully so. take a real Mainstream Sport like Soccer (or Basketball, Football...etc): what do they all have in common???
Answer: QUALITY CONTROL! they have leagues. if you want to Play in the top leauge, you Need to qualify yourself!

in Boxing, thats just not the case. you can build up fake records all day and get title shots without ever proving that you are world Level.....not even touching the issue of actually deserving a world title shot!

Try this: take a Mainstream Sports fan. then explain to him how pro Boxing works.

These are the Responses i usually get: a) "this is not a Sport"
b)" this should be illegal"
c) "are you kidding???"

 

You make some good points but you can't deny it's been watered down with too many sanctimony bodies, more than one champion in a division by the same sanctioning body, etc.

 

I'm with you there, and that's a real pet peeve of mine. I don't mind minor titles and regional belts, which both have their place, but there's too much dilution among world titles.

The best we can hope for moving forward is that they continue to cooperate a little better as they have for the WBSS so fighters can unify....a tournament that ends up with one guy holding all 4 titles is the closest we'll get to when there was 1 champ per class.

 

Of course.


https://www.boxingforum24.com/threads/he-fought-in-a-bad-era.615338/

The numbers Bukkake procured from Boxrec, and the arguments Mike Silver made in the Arc of Boxing are a couple resources I used. It's a relatively conservative conclusion for me to come to that increased foreign shows have made up for the domestic decline, and then some. Anecdotally? The UK, Russia (and the ex-Soviet states), and Japan have really picked up the slack and are certainly producing more world class fighters than they were in the 70's.

Also anecdotally....The bit about fighter earnings was looking at how much the top boxers were making (which is, admittedly, just one way to look at a complicated issue since the gap between the bottom and top of the earnings scale is very wide). Muhammad Ali is the biggest name in the sport &, conveniently enough for this thread, fought in the 70's. His career high purse was $8 million vs Holmes ($24 million adjusted for inflation). Nothing to sneeze at! But that was surpassed by heavyweights in the 90's, and by non-heavyweights in the 2000's. A B-side middleweight from Kazakhstan who came here only a few years ago just got a purse estimated over $40 million. Canelo, the A-side in that fight just signed a multi-year deal worth hundreds of millions. His fight vs Floyd had nearly 8 in 10 Mexican tv sets tuned in for it.

I don't want to turn this in to any more of a text wall than it's turning in to, but it is something I've done some digging on before arriving at the conclusions i
have. Your mileage may vary!