Boxing Headed for a Strong Finish in 2016 After a Rough Year

The immortal Bob Seger sang about the need to turn the page, and that’s sage advice for boxing fans as we move toward the conclusion of a year that has been mostly disappointing.

How disappointing?

Quick.

And without looking it up.

When was the last time you were able to pick up the remote, flip through the channels on a Saturday night and find any top-level boxing at all on HBO? Showtime? The broadcast networks?

Boxing has been largely AWOL for the past two months with only a few international bouts drawing the slightest bit of attention to the sport. Most of the talk has been about what fights aren’t happening, not which ones that are.

HBO hasn’t shown a fight on network since Sept. 10 when it presented a split-site card featuring Gennady Golovkin’s knockout of Kell Brook and Roman Gonzalez’s decision win over Carlos Cuadras.

Showtime has been dark even longer than that.

It hasn’t shown any high-end boxing since Carl Frampton took a featherweight title from Leo Santa Cruz at the end of July.

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Al Haymon’s Premier Boxing Champions series has likewise fizzled.

Its next scheduled contest is a gross mismatch between welterweight titlist Danny Garcia and Samuel Vargas, a fighter several levels below what fans should expect and demand.

You almost expect to see tumbleweeds rolling through one of those old west scenes with the lack of compelling action from the sport and many of its bigger-name fighters over the past couple of months.

But boxing fans are hopeless optimists.

They have to be in order to cope with a sport that more often disappoints them than gives them the things they want to see in a timely fashion. It took nearly a decade for Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao to finally meet, and when they did it stunk out the joint.

Canelo Alvarez has seized the Mayweather mantle as the new face of the sport. His handlers tried their best to market him as a new face for a new era, but somewhere along the line making the best vs. the best turned into what’s best for business.

His refusal to put on his big-boy pants and fight Gennady Golovkin—we also see you Billy Joe Saunders and Daniel Jacobs—without making it into a complete song and dance is the biggest black mark on 2016 boxing.

You can’t be the face of anything when you’re openly cowering away from the biggest challenge you’ve got in front of you in favor of a stadium fight against a no-hoper few on this side of the pond ever heard of before he collapsed from your body assault.

But let’s move on from that for now.

Let’s turn the page.

We know what’s been bad about boxing, but the next couple of months should provide us with a nice little salve to that festering sore that has been basically two whole months of black-hole nothingness.

The rest of 2016 and into early 2017—even without Golovkin-Jacobs in December—has a few excellent fights on the immediate horizon.

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Pacquiao will challenge Jessie Vargas Nov. 5 in Las Vegas for a welterweight title. That fight isn’t really impressing the fans—the Pac Man is expected to win easily—but the Filipino fighter/congressman always drums up interest when he appears.

The main event—of the year—comes a couple of weeks hence when unified light heavyweight champion Sergey Kovalev defends his titles against former super middleweight champion Andre Ward in a matchup of top-five pound-for-pound fighters.

Kovalev is one of the sport’s premier knockout artists who holds wins over Nathan Cleverly, Bernard Hopkins and twice over Jean Pascal. His mean streak precedes him into the ring as he looks for the statement win of his career, one that could make him the top star in boxing.

Ward has managed his career terribly, but the California native has returned from another inactive stretch with a pair of easy victories at 175 pounds, and he now seeks to become the man in his new division the way he became the man in his old one:

By taking on the meanest dog in the yard and slapping him right in the mouth.

It’s not often that two prime fighters at the top of the sport do battle with so much on the line.

November ends with another high-level battle on HBO between pound-for-pound star and super featherweight titlist Vasyl Lomachenko and former featherweight champion Nicholas “Axe Man” Walters.

Terence Crawford should be able to return in December in either a unification bout or a mandatory title defense against Antonio Orozco, while Frampton and Santa Cruz will renew acquaintances in a highly anticipated rematch in January.

Showtime also announced via a press release on Tuesday that its first quarter boxing lineup in 2017 will feature a slew of exciting fights. Among those are a super middleweight unification bout between Badou Jack and James DeGale on Jan. 14 and a welterweight unification bout between Garcia and Keith Thurman March 4.

Sure, 2016 was disappointing in many ways, but it’s not how you start. It’s how you finish.

And maybe it's about how you start again.

Let’s hope these quality fights are a sign of things to come and a reason for optimism, rather than the last gasp of a mostly forgettable year.