Where Jim Lampley Goes Wrong with His Stance in the MMA vs. Boxing Debate
To put it plainly, Jim Lampley is brilliant.
Of the many people I’ve met and talked to in the sport of boxing over my years writing about it, Lampley enjoys by far the sharpest mind and quickest wit I’ve encountered. He’s probably the smartest person in boxing. Heck, he might be the smartest person in anything.
But even smart people like Lampley are prone to saying dumb things from time to time, and such was the case recently when Lampley spoke about boxing and MMA to Bill Simmons on the famed sportswriter’s podcast (h/t MMA Fighting).
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“There are a lot of reasons why, for young people at this moment, the UFC is probably more popular than boxing, but we're not going away,” said Lampley. “We're not evaporating from the landscape. We still have a certain cache which goes with 125 years of gloved prize fighting existence and all the socio-political impact that our fighters have had."
Ah, history. A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
There’s no doubt boxing enjoys great historical relevance. It’s an asset used time and time again in the sport as a marketing tool. When Canelo Alvarez defeated James Kirkland last year in Houston, no sooner than they started peeling Kirkland from the canvas did various people involved with promoting the fight start shouting things at ringside like: this generation’s Hagler-Hearns!
It wasn’t.
Regardless, MMA can’t rely on such a long and fruitful history. It doesn’t seem to really matter. The sport has captured the hearts and minds of the under-30 crowd. Whether it was clever marketing, pure luck or just the fights themselves, UFC President Dana White’s once fledgling promotional venture has done well enough in the short term to set itself up for a long and bountiful future.
Is anyone in boxing doing the same?
No, I am not one of those “boxing is dead” cynics you read every so often when a boxing writer regrets career decisions he made, or a bored full-time professional sportswriter remembers our sport still exists. I am of firm belief that there will be boxing in this world for as long as the earth’s population remains sane enough to not impede a fighter’s freewill choice to fistfight for money.
But boxing is evaporating from the landscape. The grass will never completely dry out, but all that might remain someday is a faint sense of dampness. Let’s call it a historical cache of wetness.
Look, I admit boxing has bored me lately. I don’t watch MMA, but I’m starting to get why pretty much anyone I ever meet, once they learn I’m a boxing writer, asks me if I cover that sport, too. It’s because MMA has been accepted as a legitimate mainstream sport by advertisers, television networks and fans. MMA is relevant.
Who cares about boxing?
I do. You probably do. But is there any sense out there in the boxing community that anyone in the sport is doing anything other than what it’s always done to promote itself?
Lampley makes the point for me, albeit he does so while explaining why he thinks MMA will never have an event like last year’s Mayweather-Pacquiao pay-per-view, the most watched fight in history.
"They make the top people fight against the top people. It's more like the NFL model where any given Sunday top guys are going to fight top guys. But of course what that eliminates for them is the pinnacle event. When everybody has four to five losses you can't put together Mayweather-Pacquiao because the public wants to see people rise up way above the normal universe and then get together in some sort of summit meeting and that's when you get the million buy Pay-Per-View, or in the case with Mayweather-Pacquiao the 4.4 million buy PPV.
"
The top people fight the top people.
While I completely understand why such a thing would seem a novel concept to anyone who has lingered around boxing for longer than a day or two, it is precisely this very thing that keeps boxing from evolving into a sport that can attract, and hold, a mainstream sports audience.
Mayweather-Pacquiao was the biggest fight ever because it was the best fighting the best, and desperately boxing needs more of it.
Here’s a bit of homework for you. Think about what you would say if a friend of yours, who didn’t watch boxing or MMA, asked you if there were any good fights coming up he should watch. Which sport would have more of them? And what would he most likely see more about in newspapers and television shows?
Boxing will never grab back the reins as America’s favorite fighting sport until it changes its entire approach. And I’m not talking about television time buys or Christopher Nolan soundtracks or fighters wearing fancy suits either. For all the talk about Al Haymon’s Premier Boxing Champions infomercial experiment bringing boxing back, thus far it’s been the same thing as the rest of the sport.
A pig wearing a top hat and tuxedo is still a pig.
Boxing could learn a lot from MMA. In boxing, promoters, managers and television networks do their very best to make the most Mayweather-Pacquiao-type bouts they can. Maybe it’s greed. Maybe it’s just tradition. Whatever. The point is that the powerbrokers in boxing are playing puppet masters and prognosticators when they should be putting fights together for the explicit purpose of producing watchable content with significant entertainment value.
Enough with moving fighters along a predetermined path to make them worthy of those pinnacle events the sport produces. Those things should happen organically.
Mayweather-Pacquiao did, or at least it did if you look at the years between 2008 and 2010, the latter of which is when the fight should have actually taken place. Pre-2008, there are probably just a very small handful of people (Pacquiao, Freddie Roach and maybe some of his entourage?) who would have considered the possibility of a Mayweather-Pacquiao fight.
Had you suggested it in 2007, you might have found yourself fitted for a straightjacket.
But it happened, and the impetus for it, the huge pot of desire the sport overcooked to the point of almost not being palatable anymore, started when Pacquiao did the unthinkable by moving up two weight classes and dismantling Oscar De La Hoya, Ricky Hatton and Miguel Cotto.
The biggest fight in history revealed itself to the promoters, not the other way around.
Interestingly enough, before losing to Mayweather by unanimous decision, Pacquiao was one of those four- and five-loss fighters Lampley suggests couldn’t climb megafight summit. Nobody cared about his four losses.
For that matter, nobody cared about Conor McGregor’s two losses before meeting Jose Aldo last year either. And something tells me they won’t when he moves back down in weight and starts beating people up again.
Should I believe a fight between McGregor and another captivating performer, a mainstream crossover star like himself, wouldn’t be one of the top 10 PPVs ever?
Here’s my greatest fear for boxing: It keeps trudging along like it always has. The sport remains fractured by several separate but relevant promotional entities, and managers and TV networks keep making the same fights nobody but boxing fans really care to see.
All the while, MMA keeps pumping out fights that entertain people. The best fight the best because the sport is largely consolidated under one banner, and boxing keeps relying on that cache of historical relevance it flaunts as its saving grace.
Generations grow older. The increasingly gray-haired boxing fans slowly swing into the sweet by-and-by, one after another. Funerals happen. Babies are born. And those folks still around to see it teach the next generation to watch the kinds of fights they watched, too.
History only matters when there are still people around who care enough about what happened to remember it.
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