THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE TELEVISED
Elliot Worsell investigates the complicated world of boxing broadcasting, and what it means for the long term future of the sport
THE fight on screen is a good one, an exciting one, featuring two-way action and drama, until suddenly it stops. Mid-round, mid combination, no warning. There is no time-out called by a referee, nor has a man paraglided into the ring. Instead, the audio cuts out and the picture becomes blurry and pixelated and then freezes altogether. You were already hamstrung by a slight delay but now a spinning icon in the middle of the screen tells you the video’s buffering and soon pop-ups pounce like VADA. It’s at this point panic sets in. You might raise your voice, wake loved ones, startle a pet. You might even abuse your keyboard or mouse. But nothing will halt the pop-ups: Sally, 45, informs you she’s within a three-mile radius and can relieve a problem of
a different kind, a suave American man says you can make $100 an hour working from home and a sinister robotic voice reveals your computer has been locked and the only way to unlock it is to immediately call a tollfree number. You tell yourself to stay calm and locate the red x, the real one not the red herrings. Only then will round six recommence and your sanity return.
This, for some, is the boxing experience circa 2017. It features a computer or tablet and an online stream and maybe some social media site to dilute the feeling of isolation. It also comes complete with frustration and no small amount of resentment, resentment which stems from the very need to experience boxing like this in the first place; huddled over a screen, sacrificing comfort and quality to save pennies, sticking it to The Man. As you watch boxing this way, you are Michael Douglas in Falling Down. You are righteous and embittered and you are determined to persevere through the pixelation and watch the exact same thing countless others have paid actual money to see. Those fools. What’s more, you excuse this breaking of the rules by telling yourself and others that you were, like Douglas, driven to it. You were fed up with the endless pay-per-view events and the sales pitches and the press conferences and the faux hatred, and you were fed up also of being priced out of tickets to live events, disillusioned by the sight of what were once £50 tickets being sold for £500 on the secondary market. Most of all, though, you were fed up of being either told about or reminded of better times. “My earliest memory of boxing,” Adam Booth, trainer and manager and erstwhile promoter, once said to me, “is being hauled out of my bed by my step-dad on a Tuesday night in 1981, handed a box of biscuits and being driven through London in the early hours of the morning until we arrived at the Odeon cinema in Leicester Square to watch [Ray] Leonard-[thomas] Hearns 1. And the most excitement I’ve ever felt for a fight was when Hearns fought [Marvin] Hagler. I bought my ticket for the Leicester Square Odeon seven weeks in advance. That whole era hooked me. Even the smell of aftershaves and deodorants I used in the eighties takes me back to an era when my love for boxing was at its strongest. I’m just so lucky to have been around then. I actually feel sorry for people who are only experiencing live boxing in this day and age.”
My hand is raised. I’m one person to whom Booth and others from that golden age offer their condolences. I’ve never watched a big fight from America in a movie theatre, nor have I joined 15 million other people in watching a nation-splitting, all-british world title fight live on a terrestrial television channel. I am, instead, of the internet era; I know everything and nothing at the same time; I have experienced history via Youtube and Wikipedia and Boxrec; I can watch a fight on a screen and then complain about it on that same screen before it has even concluded; I could, if I had felt
MY EARLIEST BOXING MEMORY IS BEING HAULED OUT OF MY BED ON A TUESDAY NIGHT, AND BEING DRIVEN THROUGH LONDON TO WATCH LEONARD-HEARNS AT THE CINEMA IN LEICESTER SQUARE”
SIT BACK AND GET THE BEERS IN. PEOPLE WANT HIGH END”
inclined to do so, watched Chris Eubank’s son on a bigger screen at a Vue cinema.
“The dynamics are changing,” says promoter Eddie Hearn. “Audience numbers are decreasing for virtually every sport, not because the sports are becoming less popular but because there are more avenues to watch them. Short, sharp content is much more attractive now to the consumer. They’re happy to watch the highlights of a fight on their phone in a one-minute clip. Tune into the replay tomorrow morning? I don’t need to. I’ve just watched the whole fight in one minute. That has satisfied my need. The whole TV and digital world is changing every day and it won’t be long before you’re watching the majority of content on your phone or through Netflix or Amazon.”
Right now Britain boasts a dozen world champions whose talents can be witnessed on the following channels: Sky Sports, BT Sport, Boxnation, ITV and Channel 5. In a sense, then, boxing on these shores has never been healthier. It has been nipped and tucked, had various parts of its anatomy enhanced, and is, as Eddie Hearn so eloquently puts it, “sexy as f**k”. But it’s still, in spite of all this, only ever one ruptured bum implant away from again looking like a freak show.
Boxing, you see, is famously insecure and therefore easy to exploit. It falls for even the corniest of pick-up lines. And when it receives the very thing it craves – attention – it gets carried away and screams “I do”. Yet, to address my fear, what happens if the end goal of this sudden outpouring of love from television networks is to get into boxing’s pants for a one night stand or half-hearted fling? Specifically, what happens if the intention is not to marry and grow the sport but to get its fill in the short-term and simply take advantage of its blossoming pay-per-view culture? You can imagine the thought process: those suckers will pay for anything now.
And it’s kind of true. British and Irish boxing fans are a desperate and submissive bunch who pay for the girl because we’re told she has a price and it’s our only way of getting any. We are predisposed to gratitude because we are accustomed to being second-class citizens of the sporting world, happy our niche little pastime, this thing that encourages two men or women to hit each other in the head, is still deemed acceptable in today’s society. When rudely barged in the street, we are the ones who apologise.
“Boxing is the only sport where you’re asked to pay more outside your subscription – and it’s mad,” says Hearn. “That’s how it has always been. People are used to it.
“Sky, though, are very conscious of the fact we ask you to pay a monthly subscription and now we’re asking you to put your hand in your pocket again. So it has to be premium.”
The one disclaimer I’d add is that the definition of premium is liable to change when a market becomes saturated and the overall product standard diminishes, as it invariably does each year. That’s not even necessarily Sky’s fault, by the way. The pay-per-view bar for this year was lowered by ITV in the form of Chris Eubank Jnr vs Renald Quinlan, and chances are this bar will only get lower as more networks try to capitalise on what they perceive to be an open-legged market. Because boxing, to them, is a retail store on the day of a race riot, just waiting to be entered and robbed, and we, the hardcore fans, are the minimum wage employees stuck behind tills, powerless to stop what’s going on and shrugging our shoulders with a what-can-i-do? look on our face.
“Whether they like it or not, a fan’s subconscious takes over and they have to watch a pay-per-view event because it’s a big night of boxing and everybody else will be watching it,” says Hearn. “A normal Saturday Fight Night? Oh, it’s not pay-perview. It can’t be that great. I’ll take it or leave it. The culture in this country is very much if it’s VIP, I don’t mind. It’s a bit like valet parking. Or you go to the airport now and there’s a big queue to get through security and a fast-track lane which you can access for a tenner. Fast track? Stick me down for some of that. Same with pay-per-view boxing. I don’t care. Bosh. Sit back, get the beers in. People want high-end. You look at the burger companies starting up. They’re everywhere. Gourmet this, gourmet that. Nobody wants a f**king Burger King anymore. Now we’ve got proper burgers. Now we’ve got Burger & Lobster.” Or Hayemaker and Ringstar. That’s the latest promotional start-up to emerge and aim to prise open the cheeks of British boxing’s pay-per-view market in 2017.
“I think it’s great the Sky pay-per-view monopoly was sort of broken because other platforms can offer pay-per-view in the UK as well,” says Richard Schaefer, formerly of Golden Boy Promotions, who has joined forces with David Haye in some kind of promotional alliance. “The bad news,” he adds, “is you have to be really careful what events you put on pay-per-view because when you ask people to pull out their wallet and pay you need to make absolutely sure it is super premium content. If it’s not, you do the payper-view platform a disservice and you do the sport a disservice. I’ve seen that in the UK suddenly there are a lot of pay-per-views and you have to be careful you don’t oversupply the market with pay-per-views because people could turn very quickly.”
Adam Smith, Head of Sky Boxing, knows only too well how quickly things change in the land of pay-per-view. He remembers Best of Enemies: Haye vs. Harrison. He understands why Sky Box Office and boxing went all Ross and Rachel in 2011 and declared themselves on a break for two years.
“We probably thought it was time to have a rethink and get Sky Sports shows really flying again, which we did, and then come back into the market when we felt there were some big events,” Smith says. “The break was needed.
BOXING IS THE ONLY SPORT WHERE YOU’RE ASKED TO PAY MORE OUTSIDE YOUR SUBSCRIPTION - AND IT’S MAD. THAT’S HOW IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN”
We wanted 50/50 or 55/45 main events, ones that had a story, and not too many of them. You can’t keep going to the well. It has got to be a special night. Four or five events a year, maximum. People get ready for that, they expect that. If you have a lot of so-called big nights and they don’t really live up to the billing, you saturate the market.”
For now, let’s look on the bright side. Fifteen years ago the idea of a big fight from America being shown on British television was about as likely as today finding a clean heavyweight contender. It was an absurd notion. So much so that when Sky Sports announced they would televise a delayed compilation of Roy Jones Jnr’s 2002 mismatch with Glen Kelly, Bernard Hopkins’ stinker with Carl Daniels and Vernon Forrest’s upset of Shane Mosley – on the same damn show! – it was greeted, by me at least, like manna from heaven. I stuck a blank tape in the VCR and hit record. I then watched that thing over and over again, day after day, overjoyed that I possessed footage of some of my favourite American fighters on a tape which hadn’t cost me £20 and been posted by some bloke whose fight collection I’d seen advertised in the back of a magazine.
Today we face no such issues. We are, in fact, spoilt. Sky Sports step up to the mark when an international fight fits their schedule and Boxnation chase overseas rights like a Japanese kid collects Pokémon.
Even at home, on our patch, we make green-eyed monsters of other nations with the kind of sold-out arena and stadium events that signify a market once low on self-esteem now confidently flexing and showing the world what it can do. Ninety-thousand tickets at Wembley Stadium is what it can do, for the record, while leisure centres, previously the default venue for your average UK dust-up, are now used only for swimming.
In fact, with the stench of chlorine a thing of the past, and with pay-per-view soon to dominate our lives, there’s probably no better time to get out and actually attend a live event (providing you’re able to source tickets before the touts, of course). And, take it from me, if you do choose this approach, as opposed to going toe-to-toe with an unreliable stream or taking a punt on a pay-per-view, you’ll come to realise the live boxing experience in this country is better than it has ever been and better than anywhere else in the world. You might even rediscover what attracted you to this great sport in the first place.
PAY-PER-VIEW HAS GOT TO BE SPECIAL. FOUR OR FIVE EVENTS A YEAR, MAXIMUM. PEOPLE EXPECT THAT”