Rehabilitating the Average Boxing Fan: Part 1 – The Foundation

Enough is enough. If we don’t stop this, we will pervert and destroy the sport we love. To what am I referring? I am talking about the overemphasis of brawls and knockouts. Boxing isn’t MMA or UFC and I think we need to stop judging fights based on those sports. So here’s my effort to bring balance back to boxing expectations and to educate average boxing fans on the sport I love so dearly. This will be a five-part article which, if successful, will leave you better prepared to appreciate and enjoy the next boxing match you watch regardless of whose fighting.

So let’s start with the basics. Most major professional boxing matches are supposed to be scored based on four categories:

Clean Punching – This would be unblocked, clearly landed, legal scoring blows

Effective Aggressiveness – This is more than just moving forward and throwing punches. The punches and aggression must be effective.

Ring Generalship – This involves dictating where the fight takes place in the ring in such a way that it gives you an advantage to score punches. It is NOT running and it is NOT as simple as pushing your way forward and trying to “bully” the other fighter. It involves real footwork.

Defense – The name of the game is Hit and Don’t Get Hit. Simple as that.

While a fighter certainly gets credit for making it a short night, the knockout simply means one fighter did well at objectives one and two, while the other fighter struggled with objectives three and four. This sport has rules, and while I support the reviewing and potential changing of the rules, we can’t just make them up as we go along. Boxing has this growing culture where we don’t reward fighters who are really good at the sport based on the rules. Instead we use terms like “crowd pleasing” and “all action” fighter to glorify a very small percentage of what boxing is supposed to be. This has a cascading affect. Ultimately the dollars follow the hype, and now the networks (HBO and Showtime) only want to put up cash for fights that feature this perverted form of boxing. Think about it—how many high profile, 24\7 series, or well promoted fights have been scheduled over the last ten years where someone getting knocked out wasn’t the main draw? I can only think of one or two.

Now, I want to conclude with a few thoughts. I purposely didn’t mention any specific fighters in this article because it would have distracted from the point. This isn’t about whether or not someone was knocked out but more about the focus of the sport being skewed towards the knockout. To be clear I do enjoy “great” knockouts but I define “great” by how a fighter leverages the four categories of the sport, not by how concussive the punch measures.