The Sweet and Sour Science

Newsflash. Manny Pacquiao just decisively defeated Chris Algieri on Saturday night in Macao, China for the Welterweight Championship of the World.

Comment. Does anybody out there even care about boxing anymore?

It used to be that everyone knew who was the heavyweight champion. From Joe Louis to Muhammad Ali to Evander Holyfield, the people knew the heavyweight champ like they knew the Super Bowl quarterback. They loved it when it was Mike Tyson. He was the biggest, baddest dude, he won all of his fights, and he was the champ. The Star System at its finest. People who were the heavyweight had a special place in society. You see one of them in public, you go up to them and say, “How’s it going, Champ?”

Nowadays, most sports fans don’t know ANY of the current champs anymore. (special extra credit points for people who know all of the champs in all of the divisions. Since that is likely nobody, how about knowing ANY of the champions besides Floyd Mayweather, Manny Pacquiao and, okay I’ll give you Wladimir Klitchko). In a world where people love to know who the key people are and who’s the top dog in the sport, the average sports fan doesn’t really know much about boxing anymore, and even worse for boxing, doesn’t even care.

Boxing used to be “the sweet science.” It was the sport where sports fans everywhere could get behind it intellectually, because it put two people into a boxing ring, all by themselves, with ONLY their skill and their brains to protect them against an opponent that had the potential at any time of knocking them out. The two combatants would fight each other for ten plus rounds and nearly everyone who watched it, be it live in person, or on some form of television screen, could pretty much tell WHO won the fight. Theoretically, it was a true meritocracy. He who was better on that day… would win the fight.

And then, the crooked people got involved, always wanting THEIR person to win. If it was someone they had bet on, they wanted their person to win. Sometimes, they would pay the opponent off to “take a dive,” and he would “have a bad night” and lose a fight that he maybe could have won had things been on the up and up. Or, they would pay off the officials (usually the judges) to make the decision of a close fight come out in THEIR favor, and there would be outrage that the person who “should have won” got jobbed. Often times, the judges were picked by the heads of the boxing commissions who had certain money interests involved that were better for them if THEIR man won. And yet, it happened time and time again that the fighters would fight, and Fighter B would clearly out-duel Fighter A, but when the decisions came down from the judges, sure enough Fighter A would get picked as the winner. The sweet science became VERY sour.

The people who ruled boxing (the key heads of the WBA, WBC, IBF, WBO, the promoters like Don King, etc.,) would laugh at the public outcry over these shady decisions, all the while knowing that the suckers (because, they did not respect the intelligence of their paying customers, their audience) who followed boxing would come back for their next big fight . They fooled them once, they fooled them a second, third and fourth time, they figured they could fool them ANY time that they wanted to fool them. These were fans who were the same types of people who thought wrestling was on the up and up, they thought to themselves. Why respect these fools? We will make our money off of their ignorance, and we will keep doing it for as long as we want. What else are they gonna watch?

Then one day, something called Mixed Martial Arts started to happen. It was a fresh idea. Two combatants would basically beat the holy shit out of each other until one opponent was either decisively beaten so badly that he literally gave up, or he was simply knocked out cold.

People really respected a sport where they could see people kick each others’ ass AND they would know who won, because, judges couldn’t try to tell the audience Fighter A won when Fighter A had just been knocked out cold by FIGHTER B. Fans liked this version of fighting BETTER than boxing because the level of brutality they were inflicting on each other WAS LEGITIMATE. MMA fights were the exact types of mano a mano combat that fans were wanting to see. In a sense, it was Boxing 1.0 being overpowered by a BETTER version of what they used to try to do. MMA Fighting became Boxing 2.0 and it was BETTER than the original. And, it was NOT crooked like boxing.

And even worse, the young people growing up came in at a time when boxing was on its way to being down for the count, JUST AS the new sport of MMA started its ascension. Young people quickly adopted MMA as THEIR sport. They see boxing and they don’t even think of it as a worthwhile sport anymore. Why watch boxing when they can see REAL fighting on MMA bouts. I mean, boxers use GLOVES. What’s up with that?

The sport of professional boxing completely blew it — by their crooked decisions, their not caring for their core audience, by their greed at grabbing for all the short term money and not caring one bit about the long term legitimacy of their sport. They got greedy and they did not adapt to the marketplace, JUST as the new, more legitimate pure sport began its rise. They were the old champ that didn’t know when to retire, that got pulverized by the newer, faster, tougher challenger. Boxing was a lot like the idea of land line phones, that its creators thought would always be the way things were done, until they got steam rolled by the advent of newer, more efficient, and more convenient cell phones.

And so, as boxing continues its downward arc, one wonders if it will ever be anything close to what it once was. When Mayweather and Pacquiao are gone from the sport, people might give up on the sport completely. As years go on, boxing might be reduced to a completely irrelevant sport. You might see people looking at history books at the old pictures of Muhammad Ali and saying, “That was boxing, huh? Isn’t that the sport that Ali used to do? Whatever happened to it?”