When did you feel the popularity of boxing started to decline?

I’ve been following boxing since the 1980s and even back then always found it hard to find someone who knew enough to carry on a long conversation about it. In my high school there were maybe just a handful of guys who followed the sport whom I could talk with

 

I'd say the later part of the 80's, with the stronger cable presence. Free weekend network boxing existed into the early 90's, but it wasn't as prevalent. Eventually it just faded away altogether. That coincided with the expansion of sanctioning bodies and then PPV. Suddenly the number of people who couldn't relate added up.

 

I left the sport for years when Mayweather and Pac couldn’t get a fight going...still a travesty to me that hurt the sport terribly. But started to decline in stages...Tyson prison, Lennox retiring and not rematchibg Vitali (don’t blame him). Mayweather v Pac not happening. Rise of UFC. Idk the HE scene has drawn me back. Lot of interesting characters but I can see boxing hasn’t changed and none of them really fight each other...sad

 

Only when they’ve both lost and need a pay day before retirement. We couldn’t get Wilder v AJ when both were undefeated. Won’t get AJ v Fury either. Hell give me an interesting fight like Ruiz v Wilder and id be happy. Ruiz v Miller? U know just make interesting fights.

 

I hear ya.. I used to watch boxing on ABC wide world of sports, the Spanish channel and other networks. Pretty soon there were almost never any fights on regular TV. Then some of the bigger ones were PPV. I can remember running out to rent one of those black boxes to hook up to my TV which was a pain. And when the WBO appeared as a new “ world title “ I’m like WTF is this ???

 

The advent of PPV.
It suddenly became business first. Too many middlemen wanting to gain share of the profit

 

Oh it definitely did. He was an overnight sensation. He had video games made after him. In 1989 you could have walked up to a 10 year old girl and asked her who the heavyweight champion of the world was and she would have told you. Then again you asked a lot of people what some of his opponents names were and the conversation typically ended there. He was a shining diamond in the rough. Boxing for the most part was already dead

 

I am an Aussie not an American but I reckon this is spot on.

Any sport that becomes available on PPV or cable only stops being mainstream, shrinks the potential audience and it then invariably becomes a niche sport. Rugby Union here in Oz is a great example.

Here in Australia I watched most of Jeff Fenech's world title fights on free to air network tv and even lot of Muhammad Ali, Larry Holmes , Marvin Hagler and Mike Tysons fights on free to air and all of those fighters were very well known to most sports fans here.

The Lionel Rose vs Alan Rudkin fight held the record for the most watched Australian tv show for 33 years until the opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympics in the year 2000.

[url]https://televisionau.com/2011/05/boxer-was-a-tv-record-breaker.html[/url]

These days most Aussies would struggle to name one Aussie boxer. Jeff Horn gained some notoriety when he defeated Pac but he is still pretty much unknown to the average Aussie.

Cheers Everyone.

 

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I think it deteriorated with the emergence of the alphabet soup champions and when televised boxing as we knew it left the airwaves. PPV is killing boxing because many fans cannot afford the prices, it is like the pay toilets of yesteryear.