Keith Thurman vs. Danny Garcia on CBS Is a Tiny Step Toward Curing Boxing's Ills

Hey, did you hear the news?

There’s going to be a major championship boxing match on prime-time network television.

The announcement that the welterweight title fight between Keith Thurman and Danny Garcia is headed to CBS on March 4 prompted a press conference, a news release and the requisite amount of tittering from those programmed to believe the information was truly transcendent.

That somehow, by unifying a couple of alphabet belts at 147 pounds, the momentum that’s carried boxing from front-page news to agate-page filler will be reversed, and we’ll all bear ringside witness to a brand-new incarnation of the sweet science’s long-lost glory days.

Cue the man in the “Make Boxing Great Again” ball cap.

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“Our goal is to deliver the biggest, most meaningful matchups to the broadest audience, and an event of this magnitude belongs on CBS,” said Showtime sports boss Stephen Espinoza, in a breathless statement for the boxing media. “This is truly prizefighting at its finest—two undefeated champions in the prime of their careers fighting to unify boxing’s glamour division.”

Of course, what he failed to mention is that the casual sports fan wouldn’t know a welterweight from a paperweight, and even if he or she did, chances are good that the fighter they’d be most familiar with in the division would be neither Thurman nor Garcia, but Manny Pacquiao.

But hey, it’s the TV business.

Espinoza has a product to sell, and he’s doing his best to create a buzz for it.

And no boxing writer worth their press credential would suggest that putting a compelling fight between two talented 20-somethings in a highly visible Saturday night time slot is a bad thing.

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It’s not.

On the contrary, it’s a good thing. And it could eventually be a very good thing.

But if you’re among those believing it’s a “Get Out of Oblivion Free” card for a sport tabbed as favorite by only 3 percent of respondents to a December 2015 Harris Poll—placing it two ticks above women’s pro basketball and two ticks below ice hockey—you might want to have your zeal meter checked.

Perhaps think of it instead as an “It Can't Hurt, But Who Knows How Much It'll Help” card.

If it's a good fight—and all indicators point toward it being a good fight—it could generate a jolt with an otherwise unaware audience. But it’s a lengthy leap of faith to assume that it's going to draw a giant non-boxing crowd and suddenly tap into a rabid new fan base.

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A Floyd Mayweather Jr. fight might have done that two years ago.

A Pacquiao fight might have done it now.

A Garcia fight wouldn’t have and probably won’t.

What it could do, though, provided the product is good enough and the ratings respectable enough, is convince the powers that be to bring even more fights to free TV, which could help in the long run.

It could make household names of guys like Garcia, Thurman and others—whoever emerges from an Anthony Joshua/Deontay Wilder heavyweight scrum, for example—and create the sort of grassroots awareness that’ll eventually make people want to tune in when they hear those guys are on.

Still, the inconvenient truth remains that boxing’s issues go well beyond whether or not it's on network TV. And until the collective albatross of 17 weight classes—with as many as four or five belted champions in each—inconsistent judging, incoherent regulations and inexcusably poor pay-per-view cards is lifted, even 36 minutes of free instant classic combat won’t be more than a Band-Aid.

Sorry, Stephen.