EDITOR’S LETTER
Why British boxing must take steps to cut out the number of mismatches taking place every week
The mismatches need to stop
WHAT do you get if you cross 10 ticketselling fighters with 10 opponents who have zero chance of winning? The average British boxing show.
Not funny, right? Unfortunately, while there’s definitely an analogy to be made from the myriad fights taking place in British rings in December and the helpless turkeys being served up all over the country on the 25th, this is not a bad joke in a Christmas cracker. This, ladies and gentlemen, is what’s becoming of a sport which was originally designed to entertain and, above all, be competitive. Competiveness, surely, should be the lifeblood of an endeavour that is inherently brutal. It should have no business being so flagrantly one-sided, whatever the level. This past weekend, 115 fights took place in Britain and Ireland with only around 20 which could be considered competitive. This is a trend, by the way, not an anomaly.
Boxing News contributor Andy Whittle, without question the most prolific ringside reporter in the country, conducted a 2015 study which makes for grim reading. Out of 451 bouts involving Eastern Europeans on British soil that year, on only 10 occasions did the import win. That’s two per cent. Fifty per cent were stoppage losers, and 73 failed to make it out of the first round. And I’d venture – having read the vast majority of reports we’ve published this year – the stats for 2017 would be even more depressing. This is now a sport that could be accused of legal fixing given the standard of some ‘opponents’.
This is not supposed to offend the aforementioned ticket-sellers who go above and beyond just to make sure they get paid, nor the imports and journeyman who always do, whatever their standard. While some promoters are often left scraping the barrel in busy weekends because all the reliable ‘opponents’ have been snapped up by the bigger events, each and every promoter has to take responsibility for what they’re serving up. But the buck has to stop with the British Boxing Board of Control.
There has to come a point, surely, when the Board – who do a great job in so many other ways – say enough is enough and don’t allow Gyorgy from Hungary to enter the ring just so he can be marmalised. There has to come a point when the Board stand up and say, ‘If we’re sanctioning 100 fights a weekend, then 80 of them can’t be complete mismatches.’ It’s all well and good hosting that many contests, but if there’s so little semblance of quality among them, the quantity is, at best, completely irrelevant.
Things have to improve and if that means less shows being staged, so be it. Better still, match the ticket-sellers with the ticket-sellers. Yes, there would be less fights and less unbeaten records, but at least the fights and unbeaten records would actually mean something. The importance of the ‘0’ in the current era is a disease. While defeat-free stats may sound impressive when read out by the announcer, the only thing capable of seducing and retaining an audience – a real audience – is well-matched fights. Punters don’t walk away from a show being wowed that someone is now 12-0 after flattening a 3-65-2 opponent, or salivate at a ‘prospect’ clocking up their seventh straight 40-36 victory. The only thing that will keep them coming back for more are good, honest scraps.
In sport, being unbeaten for a long period of time should be a mark of greatness – think Novak Djokovic’s 41-match winning streak in 2011 or Arsenal going 49 matches without loss from 2003-2004 – yet in boxing it is too often the product of protective matchmaking. Problem is, of course, when the sheltered boxer is suddenly launched at someone who can actually fight back (see 21-0 Gary Cornish taking on Anthony Joshua in 2015).
I accept that boxers need to learn and shouldn’t be thrown in at the deep end haphazardly, yet there comes a point when delivering thrashings cease to provide any kind of education.
Boxing, still a seriously good spectacle when it’s staged well, cannot allow itself become a tasteless joke.
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