Boxing's Powers That Be Keep Wasting Post-Mayweather-Pacquiao Opportunities
If 2015 was the year for the casual fight fans of the world—the ones who coughed up too much money to endure watching a 38-year-old Floyd Mayweather outpoint an injured and past-his-prime Manny Pacquiao over the course of 12 boring rounds—perhaps 2016 is the year for boxing’s hardcore audience.
How else might one explain all the nondescript matchups we’ve seen this year between the sport’s biggest stars and all those there-only-because-they’re-just-barely-dangerous opponents, bouts intended to fatten records up before whatever serious money-making promotion comes along next?
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This weekend, middleweight monster and unified alphabet champion Gennady Golovkin, maybe the most interesting boxing commodity since Mike Tyson, faces something even worse than all the blown-up 154-pounders and middling 160-pound contenders he’s faced over the past couple of years.
Golovkin, the most fearsome middleweight since Marvin Hagler, is taking on welterweight titleholder Kell Brook, a fighter whose best professional win to date is over a courageous but limited 147-pounder, Shawn Porter.
Um…huh?
If you look long enough, you might find some pieces to help feign interest in the fight. Brook has long arms, is a proven winner and seems to buzz opponents enough with his power shots to at least conceivably outbox Golovkin for seven of 12 rounds.
But one shouldn’t have to look so hard to find value in an upcoming fight, especially one propagated by longtime boxing network champion HBO.
Sadly, Golovkin’s bout versus one of the four welterweight alphabet titlists seems to be a new norm in boxing, at least over at HBO after Peter Nelson took over last year.
Remember Canelo Alvarez, the Transnational Boxing Ranking Board’s lineal middleweight champion, knocking the frail-chinned Amir Khan’s soul out of his body for a spell in May?
Catch the last two bouts unified light heavyweight titleholder Sergey Kovalev and pound-for-pound superstar Andre Ward were in over the summer?
Isaac Chilemba? Alexander Brand?
Hurray.
I’m not even saying that all this finagling—for that is what the powers that be over there are doing right now (trying to massage already big fights into theoretically bigger ones)—is all garbage.
It's just mostly garbage.
We get it, guys. You want us to want to see the real matchups out there—Golovkin vs. Canelo and Kovalev vs. Ward—so bad that we'll pay just about anything to see it. Never mind those monthly subscription fees. After all, you already have those from us.
I get it. I’m just saying it sucks.
For one, the timing is bad. Yes, last year’s Mayweather-Pacquiao superfight brought more eyeballs on the sport than in probably any other timespan has over the last 50 years.
But have we forgotten how all that was squandered by the mishandling of Pacquiao’s shoulder injury by his team, the bumbling of the solution by the Nevada Athletic Commission, the embarrassment of an undercard Top Rank and Al Haymon put together and the boring, silly fight we all had to watch five years too late, one in which both fighters weren’t even near their best forms?
Superfight? It super-sucked.
Yes, HBO did a good thing by slamming fight programming all around that May-Pac promotion last May. Oh, and those promotional videos were cool; HBO is really the best at those. And sure, Canelo’s demolition of James Kirkland worked out how everyone wanted, and it seemed afterward that boxing overall might at least come out of the whole affair in decent enough shape.
But what has happened since? Has there really been any fight worth telling your friends about this year on HBO? With apologies to fans of Francisco Vargas and Orlando Salido, those gentlemen are appreciated by present boxing fans only—not all the potential ones the sport so desperately needs.
Another question for the eternal optimists out there is this: Should Terence Crawford have had his first pay-per-view experience against Viktor Postol, a fighter he was pretty much expected to dominate in the first place?
Let me put it another way: Crawford’s performance was fantastic! He beat a heck of a fighter in Postol and did it soundly. Yay!
Now, did anybody see it?
This week, fans of what can’t be called anything right now except a fringe sport on its way down the tubes are busy again readying themselves to watch a fight no one really wanted in the first place. Golovkin should pummel that welterweight on Saturday night.
They’ll follow that up later his month by watching Canelo defend his lineal middleweight championship against a 154-pounder from overseas named Liam Smith. It's not a bad fight on a paper, but do any of the middleweight champions want to defend against—oh I don't know—a middleweight?
Here’s the most sobering bit.
The very nature of boxing can lead to dramatic upsets. One punch can change the course of a fight—heck, the course of history. Bad judges can, too. Can boxing really afford to take unnecessary risks for fights no one wants to see in the first place?
Would you rather have seen all these fights we didn’t ask for, or just the biggest fights between the top stars right now?
We hardcore types might lie to ourselves and mumble something about watching the bigger events unfold from beginning to end. We want to see the whole story; buildup fights for Golovkin-Canelo and Kovalev-Ward are just appetizers to the main course. "It’s just part of the deal," we whisper as we slink away, shoulders down to the ground, ready to burrow our heads back into the promoters’ and television gurus’ figurative pockets.
But the truth is that we’re just as bad as they are at keeping our sport on the fringe.
Yes, the powers that be are why boxing is the way it is. But we —the hardcore fans who pretend this year is anything other than unacceptable—are probably why it stays that way.
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