The State of Boxing 2012
The state of boxing in 2012, part one
By Kevin Iole, Yahoo! Sports
Todd duBoef likes to refer to himself as “a boxing evangelist,” an odd choice of words for a low-key man who prefers to shun the spotlight. He’s an impeccably dressed 44-year-old who looks as if he’s stepped out of a Wall Street board room. He comes from a prominent Las Vegas family and could work in virtually any business he chose. He’s not promoting boxing because he needs to do something to pay the bills.
He’s willing to stake his future, though, on the health of a business that is often shunned by the media and derided by its customers.
As long as Floyd Mayweather is drawing nine figures when he fights, you can’t truthfully say boxing is in trouble.
He is evangelizing a sport that many say is dead, which one rival promoter terms “deathly ill” and which hasn’t been regarded as a top-tier sport for years.
Yet, the normally low-key Top Rank president displays a messianic zeal for the fight game and scoffs at a suggestion from fellow promoter Lou DiBella that boxing “is deathly ill and getting sicker by the day.”
From a global perspective, duBoef said, it has been a long time since the boxing business has been as robust. In Mexico, boxing does a booming business and the highest-rated network television program in 2011 thus far is the Manny Pacquiao-Juan Manuel Marquez fight from Nov. 12. That match did a 30.2 rating and attracted almost 40 million viewers on the free over-the-air network TV Azteca.
“It was the highest-rated program of everything for the year: The Academy Awards, the World Cup, everything,” duBoef said.
Boxing has long been a star-driven sport and it is no different today. Fights involving either Pacquiao or Floyd Mayweather Jr. are big business and routinely generate $100 million or more in gross revenue. Mayweather’s fight with Victor Ortiz sold 1.25 million on pay-per-view and generated $78.4 million in pay-per-view revenue alone.
Pacquiao fought twice in 2011, doing just over 1.3 million buys for his May fight with Shane Mosley and registering 1.5 million sales for the bout with Marquez. The Pacquiao-Marquez bout generated $11.65 million in ticket revenue at the MGM Grand Garden Arena.
But it’s not just fights involving Pacquiao and Mayweather which are doing well. Miguel Cotto and Antonio Margarito fought on Dec. 3 at Madison Square Garden in New York, drawing a sellout crowd of 21,239. The fight did more than 600,000 buys on pay-per-view.
Matches involving heavyweight title-holders Wladimir and Vitali Klitschko routinely fill soccer stadiums in Europe. Wladimir Klitschko’s bout with David Haye on July 2 in Germany drew in excess of 50,000, though that is no surprise since he’s drawn over 200,000 in his last four bouts.
“Boxing is a much healthier sport than it was 10 or 15 years ago,” duBoef said. “It has evolved to be positioned with the major brands out there. It’s positioned there. Before, it was a huge property that was huge for only one night, but it didn’t have the overall brand appeal. Now, you can see the brand appeal very, very relevant on a global basis.”
He said that while the NFL is by far the most popular sport in the U.S., its global reach doesn’t come anywhere close to that of boxing. DuBoef conceded that if Indianapolis Colts quarterback Peyton Manning walked down a street in the U.S. alongside Mayweather and Pacquiao that Manning would be much more recognized by the average person he came across.
But, duBoef said, take that same trio anywhere but the U.S. and both Mayweather and Pacquiao would dwarf Manning in recognition.
“Look,” he said, firmly. “We drew 80,000 for a press conference in the Philippines [involving Pacquiao and Marquez] and 50,000 for one in Mexico City. Think about that for a second. We draw 130,000-some people for two press conferences. Doesn’t that tell you something?”
He’s not alone in his belief in the sport’s health, despite plenty of skepticism from outsiders. Golden Boy CEO Richard Schaefer said he’s “never been more bullish” about the sport’s future. Golden Boy staged 104 shows in 2011 and Schaefer said the appetite for it has yet to be quenched.
Kathy Duva of Main Events laughed at suggestions that boxing will die once Mayweather and Pacquiao retire. The Duva family has been involved in boxing for many decades and have been one of the sport’s leading promoters for more than 35 years.
She has heard the cries of boxing’s impending doom for much of that time.
“Change the name Manny Pacquiao to Muhammad Ali and people were saying the exact same thing 30 years ago,” she said, laughing. “I can remember we were doing shows and people would say to us, ‘Why are you staying in this business? When Ali retires, it’s done.’ Well, Ali retired, and Mike Tyson retired, and Oscar [De La Hoya] retired and, guess what? Boxing is still around.”
Boxing is not without its issues, clearly. Attendance varies wildly at events. Many tickets are given away to fights that are held in casinos in Las Vegas, which is nominally the boxing capital of the world. Fans have lost touch with the fighters and are puzzled by the dizzying array of sanctioning bodies and championship belts.
The International Boxing Federation, the World Boxing Association, the World Boxing Council and the World Boxing Organization are considered the four major bodies that award championship belts.
Given that there are 17 divisions in boxing, that means that at any time, there is the potential to have 68 men who call themselves a world champion.
It gets more bizarre than that, though. The WBC also has the “Diamond Belt” and the “Silver Belt,” and it recognizes some men as interim champions and others as “champions in recess.” The WBA has several divisions in which it has multiple champions, because it refers to certain title-holders as so-called “super champions.”
A trip to a Las Vegas mall one day led to interviews with 25 fans about boxing. Of those, six said they never watched the sport and were never fans. Of the other 19, only eight identified themselves as hardcore fans and of those eight, only five could name a world champion other than Pacquiao or Mayweather.
Those fans said they had many issues with the sport, but the vast majority cited the sheer volume of champions as their top issue. They said they couldn’t keep up with who the champions are.
There’s also a palpable sense among the public that the sport is corrupt and that decisions favor the most-connected fighters.
Schaefer, who was outraged by the officiating in Amir Khan’s loss to Lamont Peterson in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 10, conceded it is an issue, but said commissions should use the money generated by fights to fund education of referees and judges.
“Look at the kind of money we are pouring into state coffers,” Schaefer said. “It is not an insignificant amount of money and I think that needs to be used to help the business. Right now, there are some judges in world title fights, or referees, who aren’t at the same level as a lot of others, and when you get that, you get the kind of results that make people question the sport.
“It’s the same thing as if you asked me to fly a jumbo jet from Los Angeles to New York. I’m not qualified to do that and I haven’t been trained to do it. It would be a pretty bumpy ride, I would think. The corruption that people talk about comes from the mobster days, when the mob was running boxing, but that doesn’t exist any more. But there are a lot of officials out there who aren’t qualified and that needs to be fixed.”
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
The state of boxing in 2012, Part 2
By Kevin Iole, Yahoo! Sports
Boxing begins the new year with some ominous signs. Its top fighter, Floyd Mayweather Jr., will spend the first three months in a Las Vegas jail cell and will turn 35 while he’s incarcerated.
Manny Pacquiao, the sport’s second-best fighter and biggest draw, is talking about winding down his career and running for governor of his home province in the Philippines in 2013.
But promoters, fighters and managers are encouraged by what they see as optimistic signs for the sport’s future, despite myriad problems.
Light heavyweight champion Bernard Hopkins is among those who believe the sport has a good future. One warning sign is that many inner-city fighters, primarily African-Americans, have abandoned the sport.
But he said if promoters do a better job of making more compelling fights and, particularly, making matches that the fans want to see, the sport will thrive.
He decried the so-called “appearance fights” which have been so pervasive on television, particularly premium cable channels, in which a promoter’s star is given a soft touch in order to look good and pad his record.
Hopkins praised the UFC and said boxing should adopt its manner of match-making.
“You see a UFC card and they make quality fights and going in, it’s not clear-cut who is going to win,” Hopkins said. “It’s OK if you know it’s 60-40 in favor of one guy, but if it’s 90-10 or 80-20, that doesn’t work. I think you have to put the fighters on levels and uses letter grades like we did in school.
“If you do that, then it’s easy. No way an A-fighter should ever fight a C- or a D-fighter. You put them in with guys of their own level and match the styles the right way, and you’re going to have one great fight after another. You’ll never have a great fight when you have an A-fighter going up against a D-fighter.”
Promoter Kathy Duva of Main Events concurred and placed much of the blame for the poor matchmaking on HBO and Showtime, whose executives demand fighters with glittering records. She said promoters used to market all their fighters, not just the top two or three, but because of the demand for fighters with shiny records among the television executives, the focus has shifted to marketing only those with the glossiest records.
As a result, she pointed out, most promoters protect their stars zealously and rarely match them aggressively, so as not to lose.
“I have had far too many conversations with television executives where the same words come out of their mouths: ‘Well, our viewers have seen him lose more than once, so we don’t want to have him back on,’ ” she said. “In today’s world, Arturo Gatti and Micky Ward couldn’t get on HBO, let alone fight each other doing it. How much would we have all lost had that been the case?
“Part of what we’re trying to do with the series we’re doing [on the NBC Sports Network] is to get away from that notion that if you lose, your career is over. Because if you believe that, you have no incentive to fight anyone who can beat you.”
Main Events begins a quarterly series on Jan. 21 on the NBC Sports Network [known as Versus until Jan. 2] in which they promise quality, evenly matched fights.
Jon Miller, the president of the NBC Sports Network, thinks the series will be successful because viewers will quickly learn that there are no sacred cows and that anyone who fights on it can’t count on an automatic win.
“It’s incumbent upon us to showcase fighters in competitive fights and help to build a model that shows how great boxing is and what it can be,” Miller said. “The best way that I would equate that is, for example, when you look at the sport of golf. If Tiger [Woods] and Phil [Mickelson] only played on pay-per-view, you’d have no way of knowing who Ricky Fowler and Rory McIlroy and Bubba Watson and guys like that are.
“I think the same is true here. We need to showcase these other fighters and help build them up so that they become more household names and more recognizable, and if they eventually migrate to a bigger payday, then that’s great.”
It’s the kind of news that Robert Guerrero, who holds the interim WBA and interim WBO lightweight titles, wants to hear. The 28-year-old Guerrero is desperate to fight the best challengers and has been calling out Mayweather.
Boxing, he said, is a great sport when two motivated and talented fighters meet with a lot riding on the outcome. He said he’s frustrated at how difficult it is to make the best matches.
“I’m a fighter, but I’m also a fan of boxing and I don’t like it when we don’t see the best fighting the best,” Guerrero said. “The Super Six was great because look at how many great fighters there were going at it. That’s what people want to see, the best against the best, champions fighting each other and risking it all.”
Cameron Dunkin, one of the sport’s top managers, with fighters such as Timothy Bradley and Brandon Rios in his portfolio, said he thinks the sport’s future is brighter than at any time since he got into it in 1986.
There are problems, he conceded – “Guys are getting ranked who shouldn’t be and guys are getting title shots they don’t deserve,” he said – but much of it stems from a lack of promoting.
He said too many promoters are willing to take the television money, open the doors and hope the fans flock in without doing anything to convince the public why it should spend its money on a specific fighter or fight card.
Dunkin said he has been pushing his fighters toward Top Rank and Golden Boy because they are promoters who don’t operate that way and are attempting to change the way fights are promoted. He raved at many of the initiatives of Top Rank president Todd duBoef, who has improved the company’s foreign distribution, overhauled the company’s website, dramatically increased its social media presence, hired several prominent boxing executives to scout and recruit the best boxing prospects, brought sponsorship sales in house and worked toward making the in-arena events more lively.
“I see the way a lot of promoters work, and it’s why I’ve been pushing so hard with my kids to get them to those two,” Dunkin said. “There’s a lot more to promoting than getting a television deal. It’s easy to sit here and say, ‘Hey, call Kevin Iole and have him write something about my fight.’ That’s part of it. We need you there writing about the fights but it goes way beyond that, and too many of these promoters don’t get that.
“I see the things that Todd is doing [at Top Rank], and it is amazing. They’re being creative in the way they do things. They’re making the fights events now. There’s a lot of music, they’re glitzy, they’re fun. The kids see that, and they feel like they’re really being promoted. I’ll probably get in trouble for saying this, but what Todd is doing, the groundwork he is laying, is going to result in some great things for boxing. He’s done incredible work.”
Top Rank founder Bob Arum, the 80-year-old Hall of Fame promoter, said he thinks boxing’s bright future is directly attributable to the work done by duBoef, his stepson. He called duBoef “a genius” and said he has laid the foundation for a strong future for the company.
Arum said he believes boxing will wind up on network television in 2012 and will continue to transition toward the Internet. Arum said Top Rank has been working on acquiring sponsors so when it goes to the network, it is what he called “pregnant.” It already will have all the advertising spots sold before it starts.
That will enable Top Rank to introduce fighters to a generation of fans who are missing out on them. The poor economy has forced people to make difficult decisions, and luxuries such as premium cable are often the first thing cut in their budgets.
Part of the issue, he said, has been that many of his competitors are undercapitalized and are either too cheap to spend money or afraid to do so for fear of a loss.
“Boxing is just another form of entertainment,” Arum said. “We can do a lot of things as promoters – getting publicity, doing marketing, so on and so forth – but we can’t control how the fights go. We can make the best matches we can, but once the bell rings, what happens is beyond our control.
“So, to make sure that we create a fun environment and want the person who buys a ticket to want to come back, we’re doing a lot of things in the arena: dancers, lights, music, singers, what goes up on the scoreboard, all those sorts of things. You have to spend money to make money, but there are a lot of people in this business who aren’t forward-thinking and don’t realize that you have to invest in the product. There has been way too little investment in the product for far too long, and it can’t remain that way.”
Golden Boy president Oscar De La Hoya said he gave a dictate to his matchmaker, Eric Gomez, to put on the best fights possible and said he has told his fighters they should expect to face difficult opponents each time out.
He agreed with Arum that there will be network television in 2012 and said he would be willing to put his biggest stars on free television, with the caveat that they fight opponents they’re not guaranteed to beat.
“I look at the amazing work that Dana White and Lorenzo Fertitta have done building the UFC and MMA up from nothing into this great sport and great league,” De La Hoya said. “We should take a look at what they’re doing. They are on network TV now. They put on some great shows. Why are they succeeding when some people say boxing is struggling?
“It’s the fights. The bottom line is, we have to get out there and let people know about the fighters we have, and then we have to put them into great fights. If we do that, boxing can get back to the glory days, easily. It’s not a secret. Dana White can do it and so can we. We just have to all as promoters in this sport work together for the good of the sport and put on the fights the people want to see.”
