By Cliff Rold

3 million pay-per-view buys.

No fight has hit the plateau yet.  In 2010, a potential epic may do the trick if Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao elect to share a ring together.

Chicago’s Francisco Rodriguez probably dreamed of being in such an event one day.  When he was toiling through the Golden Gloves, when he was dealing with the adversity of a pair of early defeats in his first sixteen professional bouts, it’s not hard to imagine such dreams still keeping him going.

Rodriguez suffered fatal injuries in a fight last weekend against another dreamer, Teon Kennedy. 

While so much of the action in the ring has been memorable this year, boxing has suffered a heavy cost in losses.  Former world champions Vernon Forrest, Arturo Gatti, and Alexis Arguello all died through violent circumstances.  Jr. Bantamweight contender Z Gorres fell into a coma after his last bout but reports have him on the road to recovery.

Now the boxing world says goodbye to Rodriguez. 

This scribe regrettably wasn’t very familiar with Rodriguez’s career before news of his passing.  Yet as we approach the annual American tradition of Thanksgiving, it is to him we should turn first.  Amid the cheers, the barber shop debates, the anticipation for the next classic battle, it is the sacrifice of Rodriguez which serves as a reminder of what it is we’re all watching.

What it is we’re asking of the men and women who enter the ring.

Boxing is a sport which has always made for excellent literature and cinema.  The one on one combat, the presumed (sometimes overly presumed) seedy underbelly, the Horatio Alger spirit of it all can obscure one important element.

Boxing exists, as do all forms of entertainment, because it can yield an audience. 

When audiences fail to arrive, fail to drop their dollar and step through the turnstile, a sporting event is no more.  After the hoopla of the Women’s World Cup Soccer event in 1999, an event which drew massive crowds and press coverage, a professional women’s soccer league was attempted.

By 2003, the Women’s United Soccer Association was no more.  People weren’t showing up at the stadiums and weren’t tuning in on TV.  In 2009, a new attempt was launched with early struggles to draw more than 5,000 fans a game.

Boxing has had its attendance problems in recent years and in pockets throughout its history.  It has continued to find a way to profit, to reach an audience and it’s not hard to understand why.

Soon, the various publications and websites, this one included, will begin to compile the ‘end of decade’ awards.  Voting will take place to name the ‘best fighter’ and ‘best fight’ of the last ten years.  In both of these categories, lovers of the sweet science can draw on a vast pool of memories.  In a supposedly fading sport, the competition for these honors has been fierce.

In the last ten years, two of the great Mexican rivalries of all time graced the stage in Marco Antonio Barrera-Erik Morales and Israel Vasquez-Rafael Marquez.  The world shrunk through technology, allowing for access to fighters who once would only have been short blurbs in the back of an old Boxing Illustrated.  How else to explain the acclaim given to the 2006 Fight of the Year between Somsak Sithchatchawal and Mahyar Monshipour?  Two 122 lb. fighters, with no U.S. television, wouldn’t have registered before YouTube and the internet.

One year prior to Sithchatchawal-Monshipour, boxing got something just as special as any of the above.  Great fights are one thing; to be arguably the greatest fight in the history of one of the game’s most storied weight classes is another.  Yet that is what Diego Corrales and Jose Luis Castillo may have pulled off, duking it out for the Lightweight crown in their first 2005 contest.

It was a fight for the ages which today’s fan could tell their kids about the same way the old man tells the tale of watching Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier or the old man’s old man recounts listening to Joe Louis-Max Schmeling II.

And of course this decade has seen Pacquiao, the once and former Flyweight champion before the decade even began, climbing from below Featherweight all the way to a share of the Welterweight title.

Sure, it’s harder to find someone else who watches the fights regularly these days.  Boxing fans spend time at the water cooler selling the sport before they can even recount the action.  They compete with tales of Football and Baseball as they always have while also warding off talk of NASCAR and Golf.

Golf?

No matter.

These fights and fighters, in this time, have given of themselves just as those who came before them did.  The cathartic wave boxing brings with it, the part which is both addictive and rarely mentioned, is still in ample supply.

There is a reason it isn’t mentioned of course. 

Francisco Rodriguez. 

As cheers rain in from the rafters for every brutal exchange, and boos envelop the ring when the action slows, it’s with an air of pretending.  Despite its reputation, boxing doesn’t produce many fatalities.  With every new opening bell, the rarity allows almost a sense of make believe that such an end can’t fall on the fight unfolding.  If a beating becomes overwhelming, even the most excited will begin to call for the stoppage because no one wants to see that end. 

And yet it’s there every time two fighters step in the ring.  It is the risk they assume.  It is a risk we are willing to pay for them to take.

It is important, on a day when we give thanks, in this boxing-related venue, to remember that risk.  Much time and ink is spent evaluating which fighter is the toughest, the most willing to take risks, but toughness and risk is inherent in the first step into the ring isn’t it?  Even realizing it will inevitably be taken for granted again…

From the chronicling of early fisticuffs in Homer to the brink of Pacquiao-Mayweather, the fighter has risked all for the entertainment of others and the riches they can bring to themselves in doing so.  They display courage and dedication; shed sweat and blood; provide thrill and tragedy and drama to the lives of observers.

The least we owe those who make it both in and out of the ring is thank you.

There is no measure for what we owe the rest.
 
Cliff Rold is a member of the Ring Magazine Ratings Advisory Panel and the Boxing Writers Association of America.  He can be reached at roldboxing@hotmail.com