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Posted by on Feb 12, 2015 in Blog, Sports Betting | 1 comment

Has Heavyweight Championship Boxing Been Knocked Out of the American Sporting Consciousness?

 

heavyweight-boxing-championship

 

Has any sport’s popularity plunged so deeply within such a short period of time as boxing?

 

Quick — name the current heavyweight boxing world champion.

I’ll bet you can’t.

Don’t worry about it — I didn’t know the reigning champ’s name either, so I had to look it up.  Actually, there are three reigning champions and four world titles in boxing’s global clusterfuck — Wladimir Klitschko (who owns the IBF and WBO titles) , Rusian Chagaev (WBA champion), and Deontay Wilder (WBC champion).

Just a generation or two ago, boxing was arguably the most popular sport in the world aside from soccer (what non-Americans regard as “football”).  When Muhammad Ali fought a title bout somewhere, anywhere, it wasn’t just a sporting event.  The match became a social and cultural spectacle, an epic clash of personalities in which even elite members of the media were among the combatants — be they Howard Cosell, Hunter S. Thompson, George Plimpton, or Norman Mailer.  A heavyweight championship fight was an international attraction, sometimes carrying with it momentous social and political ramifications.  Recall the brutal dictatorial regimes of Sese Mobutu (Zaire) and Ferdinand Marcos (The Philippines), just two of the beneficiaries who hosted what became widely considered as the greatest fights of all time.

No matter where you lived, everyone at work and school discussed and argued about the next championship fight, no matter who was stepping into the ring.  And when the opening bell rang, many of us dropped whatever we were doing so we could follow the action.  When the fights weren’t shown on television, a void which increasingly became common during the 1970s as promoters discovered they could squeeze millions more out of the world’s fascination with boxing’s iconic personalities via exclusive closed-circuit theatrical showings, we became increasingly annoyed that we couldn’t afford the ticket cost amounting to a day’s pay ($25 to $50 at the time).  So instead, we stayed up late at night awaiting “Special News Bulletins” on the three major networks which would break into programming live and announce who had won.  It’s hard to imagine anything even remotely resembling the “Rumble in the Jungle” or the “Thrilla’ in Manila” happening today.  Most of us would be hard-pressed to remember the last great heavyweight championship fight we saw on television.

Once upon a time, boxers weren’t just athletes.  They were more than that.  Boxers represented far more powerful interests than just themselves.  Some were propped up as symbols of national power.  Some even epitomized good versus evil.  The best (or worst) examples of this travesty were heavyweight rivals — and later friends — Joe Louis and Max Schmeling, two champions who fought epic battles during the late 1930s, preceding the outbreak of World War II.  Schmeling had no political affiliations whatsoever but was ungraciously puppet-stringed by the American media to Nazism.  Louis suffered an even worse personal and professional indignity, forced to smile and pretend everything was okay as the deceptive face of a two-tier nation that openly denied brothers and sisters of his own skin color their fundamental human dignity and basic constitutional rights.  Louis and Schmeling were as many victims of their twisted political and social times as boxing champions.

Later, boxing heavyweights became the embodiment of rival cultural factions.  During the 1960s and 1970s, if you were pro-Ali, that allegiance made a political statement.  Cheering for Ali identified you as someone who was probably anti-Vietnam War, and pro-civil rights.  For some, aligning oneself with Ali was like joining the “Black Power” movement, only far safer and more mainstream.  Meanwhile, those who identified closely with the establishment almost always cheered against Ali, sometimes bitterly so.  America had never seen an athlete before — Black or White — ever talk that way.  His conversion to Islam and constant devotion to Elija Muhammad only widened the racial and cultural rift.

After Rocky Marciano retired undefeated in the late 1950s, Blacks dominated the heavyweight ranks over the next half-century.  Anytime a White fighter stepped into the ring to face Ali, or Joe Frazier, or George Forman, or Ken Norton — or later Larry Holmes, or Evander Holyfield or Lennox Lewis, the challenger was shamelessly referred to as “the Great White Hope.”  These racial overtones were troubling.  It wasn’t necessarily that boxing had an ugly side.  It was the society that did.

Twenty-five years ago today, “Iron Mike” Tyson was knocked unconscious by an unknown fighter named Buster Douglas.  The supposed mismatch, considered by everyone except a few sycophants within the Douglas camp as little more than a potentially lucrative exhibition match for both fighters that would probably go no more than a few rounds, took place in Tokyo, which was then enjoying a booming economy and hungry for a memorable sporting spectacle.  They certainly got that and then some, concluding with one of the greatest upsets in boxing history.  Yet before it began, the match appeared so one-sided and victory for Tyson seemed like such a foregone conclusion that some Nevada sportsbooks didn’t even post odds on the fight.  The few that did list challenger Douglas as a 43-to-1 underdog.

I never got a chance to see the fight.  In fact, I didn’t even hear about the shocking result until one week later, since I was stationed in Romania at the time, just which was thawing from a long hibernation from the real world in the aftermath of a 22-year rule by Nicolae Ceausescu.  Back then there was no such thing as the Internet or cell phones.  The only television channel broadcasting within the entire country (which aired just 12 hours a day) was a state-run network that showed government propaganda films and decade-old reruns of the American detective show Kojak, dubbed in Romanian.  “The news,” as we know it, didn’t exist there (which made me really come to appreciate media and all the choices we now have today to obtain information).

Eight days after Douglas knocked the reigning heavyweight champion of the world to the canvass, stripping away Tyson’s aura of invincibility and pretty much sending a once-great boxer into a downward spiral from which he still has not arisen to his feet, I learned the news of this epic upset while standing in the mailroom at the United States Embassy in Bucharest.  One of the Marines, stationed to protect the embassy and staff, happened to be picking up his mail at the same time.  He opened his mailbox and pulled out the latest issue of Sports Illustrated.  Imagine standing in frigid Bucharest seven weeks after the revolution, far removed from any English-language news outlet, which might as well have been a different galaxy from the 24/7 sporting cycle of ESPN.  The cover announced boxing had a new world heavyweight champion.  That was the last time I cared.

Everything’s different now.  News from around the world is both instantaneous and simultaneous.  Buster Douglas lost his championship title just seven months later and then disappeared into oblivion.  Mike Tyson lost his millions and then declared bankruptcy.  He’s now performing a stand-up routine occasionally on a Las Vegas stage when he’s not at home raising pigeons.  But the biggest loser of all was heavyweight championship boxing itself, which died on this night 25 years ago.  It hasn’t been the same since then and is unlikely ever to achieve even a fraction of the popularity it enjoyed during the Ali era, and before.

It wasn’t only Mike Tyson who got knocked out on February 11, 1990.  It was the sport of boxing which was clobbered to its knees, from which it’s failed to raise again and answer the sound of the bell for another round.

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READ:  Boxing

1 Comment

  1. I can’t agree. The HW division enjoyed a nice little run through the 90s. Holyfield, Lewis and Bowe maybe didn’t have star power of Tyson, but people still showed up to watch. There was great interest in Tyson once he got out of prison and fought Holyfield. A 45-year-old 250+ lb George Foreman came out of retirement to become the world champion, creating a new hero for fat old guys on the couch.

    The HW division is unnoticed today because it sucks and is stagnant. The Klitschko era has been considered tremendously dominant, yet boring. A gigantic Russi^H^H^H Ukrainian who jabs everyone to death is not going to excite the American public. There is no challenger that gets anyone excited. Hence, boxing today has turned to the far more charismatic Pacquiao and Mayweather for its stars.

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