Once upon a time, boxing was great
ST. LOUIS — Professional boxing in America used to be a big deal. It used to be important. It used to have a grip on the American sports consciousness the way football, baseball and basketball now do.
The great heavyweights are now NFL tight ends or NBA power forwards, and the audience that once craved the sweet science has shifted its obsession to the mixed martial arts octagon.
Now in the only places that matter in its sport — Las Vegas and your television set — the sweet science has been reduced to something of a sideshow attraction. It seems that the only one left in the boxing game capable of elevating the sport to its old high perch is the extremely loud, slightly irritating, brilliantly calculating and very talented Floyd Mayweather Jr.
People flock to his fights. Saturday, as he defended his WBA superwelterweight championship and increased his record to a stunning 430 with his unanimous decision over Miguel Cotto, Mayweather walked away with a record $32 million for his efforts. People are willing to buy his expensive pay-per-view battles regardless of the $70 price tag because they know they’ll get their money’s worth.
But Mayweather is also the very reason that boxing is no longer America’s favorite warrior sport, no longer among our top three sports obsessions. And it’s not because he’s about to begin serving an 87-day sentence for misdemeanor domestic violence, either.
No, here’s the problem with Mayweather.
He won’t give us the fight we all want: Mayweather vs. Manny Pacquiao.
The two best pound-for-pound fighters in the sport simply won’t fight each other, squabbling over money, prestige and all sorts of other silliness.
It would never happen in any other major sport, but it happens in boxing all the time, which is why people are just flat sick and tired of the once-grand sport.
And now that Mayweather is heading off to prison in a few weeks and Pacquiao is making plans to fight lesser opponents and then head off into retirement, boxing fans are left knowing this fight will never happen.
After his victory Saturday night, Mayweather wanted to make sure everyone knew where to place the blame for this travesty.
“It’s not my fault,” Mayweather said.
He says the blame belongs in the lap of Pacquiao’s promoter Bob Arum, who won’t accept anything less than a 50-50 split of the purse. Of course, Arum says it’s all Mayweather’s fault because he’s being too greedy.
Ahhh, yes. Nothing like folks in boxing hurling around the “greed” label. Hello, pot. Meet kettle. Well, whose fault is it? It’s actually the fault of the structure of the entire sport, because boxing’s biggest and most maddening problem is how there are no mechanisms in place to ensure the best will always fight the best when they ought to fight.
Boxing has no commissioner. It has no central organizing body or ultimate authority to override the selfish interests of boxers and promoters. Until there is a true commissioner of the sport who can force the top fighters to meet in an orderly fashion, then the sport’s decline will continue and its popularity will fall even further behind the swelling phenomenon of mixed martial arts.
Whatever issues old-school boxing fans like me might have with the MMA, the one thing that cage fighting has is an undisputed man who is in charge of the sport like UFC President Dana White.
Last summer, in one of his many public duels with boxing’s establishment, White took on Arum and nailed him with a dead-on verbal punch. White accused the powers that be in boxing with repeated failures to do great things for their sport. Instead of building it up, promoting it and taking all the right steps to elevate boxing, men like Mayweather and Arum allow greedy self-interest to be their guiding force.
I have seen this go on in boxing for decades. The way they do business is a joke. We never get to see the great fighters meet at the right time for competitive excellence. Instead, they fight when they get around to it. They fight when one of them — and sometimes both of them — are on the decline. They fight only when the paycheck is right, even if it means we never get to see a Mayweather and Pacquiao face off when they are both in their primes.
That’s not how it used to be. Remember how popular boxing was when great heavyweights of the 1970s like Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, George Foreman and Ken Norton all went after each other multiple times? Remember the 1980s and early 1990s when the welterweight division dominated our sports attention and Ray Leonard, Roberto Duran, Thomas Hearns and Marvin Hagler gave us those masterful, elegant and brutal wars?
That’s not boxing anymore. Those days are over, and they’re not coming back.