Where Have All the Boxers Gone?

You see them in there all the time, forgotten old men sittings in plastic chairs inside the dusty old gym next to the ring, still drying from the sweat and blood fresh from another mid-afternoon battle.

They talk uppercuts and right hooks and stories about Sugar Ray. Or the time they trained a young kid who worked too hard, and then drove him four hours to some rundown gym in a hick town up North, just so he could get his head bashed in by another amateur looking for his title shot.

Boxing has lost its flavor. In this country, the sport used to mean something. A "big fight" was the equivalent of the Super Bowl, either watched on television or listened to by millions on the radio.

Have you every watched a Los Angeles Lakers game and been amazed that every A-list celebrity is sitting in the first row with big smiles on their faces? That was boxing times ten. The boxers were bigger then life: Ali, Frazier, Foreman, Sugar Ray, Mike Tyson, "Hitman" Hearns…

Where has all the magic gone? 

In the last 20 years, the sport of boxing has been in the midst of a vicious tornado of dope testing and alleged fixed fights. The promoters behind the fights are well known to base their endorsements on style and flash instead of content. Less is made out of the athletes' actual skill and determination. Instead the fights are hyped around made-up beefs between the two camps and meaningless backstories put in place to extenuate the "toughness" and "brutality" of the fighters. 

Don King, the flamboyant and infamous boxing promoter, had been at the center of this boxing maelstrom. He is part of the reason why there is now this intense favoring of the "bad boy" image. Gone are the world-class, politically active champion fighters like Muhammad Ali or Joe Louis. 

Eventually, this image problem will pass. Boxing has been on a downward slide in money and in popularity for a number of years. Eventually, somewhat because of the recent onslaught of bad press in other sports (steroids in baseball, and the court cases of Donte Stallworth, Michael Vick, and Plaxico Burress in football), boxing will regain its composure and become a sport worth watching and following again.

The promoters are smart people. They understand that they are losing money and want to change it.

Doping used to be a huge problem, but now there are numerous tests for these boxers, plus the added pressure that one bad test will mean both a ban and a complete thrashing in the court of public opinion. Boxing, a sport built on brawn, will not be tolerated if it becomes clear that there is a soft penalty for steroids or HGH. 

The crime of fixing fights in boxing is something that boxing fanatics have struggled with in the past. Usually, no matter how hard the fighters and the gamblers work behind the scenes to ensure invisibility, it is quite easy to pick out a fixed fight. They have learned that the more fights there are like this, the less money they will make. Nobody is going to bet if they assume something is fixed in one fighter's advantage. 

Although we, as sports fans, are far from the days where we can look at boxing with pride, it is a sport that has gotten better in recent years and will continue to improve.

Old fighters and trainers have reason to look on boxing's current state with disgust. Hopefully it changes, and a new generation, many years from now, will be awed by the various boxing legends, just like people now think back to the '60s or '70s, and reminisce.