DRAWING CARD
Jack vs. Stevenson connects.
When challenger Badou Jack landed that last, thunderous right uppercut in the closing moments of Saturday night’s title fight at the Air Canada Centre, the blow raised a misty cloud of sweat and blood around champion Adonis Stevenson’s head.
How the 40-year-old Stevenson, the WBC light-heavyweight champ, remained upright defies explanation. But when the final bell sounded in a title bout that ended in a majority decision draw, the roughly 5,000 spectators present greeted the fight’s completion with a standing ovation. A few hundred of them attended on complimentary tickets, but the event’s organizer felt most encouraged by the 4,728 who paid.
Stevenson and Jack were original scheduled to face off in Montreal, and the event relocated to Toronto less than a month before fight night. Pro- moters Yvon Michel and Floyd Mayweather incurred steep costs to move the fight card to Toronto, with no guarantees that a bout between a Montrealer (Stevenson) and a Las Vegas resident (Jack) would sell here.
Michel forfeited a deposit at Montreal’s Bell Centre, and both promoters had to pay Toronto-based Lee Baxter to postpone his own card and help organize theirs. And if Saturday’s bout served as a referendum on the viability of big-time boxing in Toronto, Baxter says ticket sales provide hope — which is why he elected against largescale ticket giveaways to fill the 1,000 empty seats.
“We could put 50,000 people in the Rogers Centre for free for almost anything,” Baxter said before the event. “If it’s free, they just show up because everyone’s cheap. But when you have actual hard buys … that’s success. It shows that there’s interest that people are willing to pay for.”
Saturday’s ambiguous ending thrusts Toronto back into the broader boxing industry’s spotlight.
A winner between Stevenson and Jack could have looked forward to a light-heavyweight showcase fight against the winner of Sergey Kovalev’s August showdown against Montrealbased Colombian Eleider Alvarez. But Saturday night’s draw had stakeholders discussing a Stevenson-Jack rematch.
Before the fight, Mayweather Promotions CEO Leonard Ellerbe promised the company would return to Toronto, but didn’t specify when.
“This is a big-time sports city,” Ellerbe told reporters at a prefight news conference. “You look at the Maple Leafs. You have the Raptors. And now you have Stevenson versus Jack … We’re coming back (to Toronto). There’s no doubt about that.”
After the bout, Mayweather grumbled about the scorecards — one judge favoured Jack by two points, overruled by the two judges who scored it a draw. And while he didn’t accuse officials of pro-Stevenson bias, both he and Jack said they’d prefer a rematch happen in Las Vegas.
Michel, meanwhile, maintained that he has no plans to bring Stevenson stateside, where he last fought in 2011. Instead, he said Saturday’s ticket sales prove the Air Canada Centre belongs with Montreal’s Bell Centre and Quebec City’s Videotron Centre as a world title fight venue and rematch site.
“It has to be in Canada,” Michel told a post-fight press gathering. “The fight should go where it is the most wanted.”
Last year, 20 pro boxing shows took place in Ontario, up from just nine the previous year. So far, 2018 has seen eight pro events with three more scheduled.
While the pro boxing scene’s growth reflects the emergence of a reliable audience for southern Ontario-based stars, the gap between those events and Saturday’s card is akin to the difference between the OHL and NHL. One product realizes it’s local but knows its stars might graduate to bigger stages; the other is a destination for the sport’s elite.
Baxter hopes Saturday’s event can spur growth in his midmarket niche. He recently signed an exclusive deal to host boxing events at the Scotiabank Convention Centre in Niagara Falls, and hopes to stage another at the ACC — which will become Scotiabank Arena in July — before summer ends.
Beyond that, he’s confident Toronto can rival Montreal as a home for major fights.
“Give me eight weeks’ notice, give me the right fight, give me the right local undercard (and) and there’s no reason why 18 months from now we can’t be selling the upper bowl in the ACC,” he said.