By Tom Donelson
Another television marketing ploy needed is developing more series featuring young boxers. SHOBOX, the next generation, is one of boxing most promising programs since it regularly features up and coming prospects. This program forces young prospects to step up thei level of competition. ESPN in the early 80’s followed a similar pattern by emphasizing young fighters. What is needed for the sport are more programs like SHOBOX. Boxing is an individual sport and individual sports need personalities. Strong personalities drive the sport and boxing needs to be developing potential stars either through Regional broadcasts or programs like SHOBOX.
Another problem is the misuse of pay-per-view and the expense of pay-per-view. Many of the big fights are costing as much as $50 and most of these events don’t match the big price tag.
Over the next three or four months, a boxing fan could easily spend as much $300 on PPV events. What this does is price many fans out of the market. First thing that needs to be done is to reevaluate the prices. Some fights could easily attract a bigger audience with a $20 price as oppose to the higher price. Or with a $20 price tag, fans may be willing to watch more PPV events. In October, Castillo-Corrales competed with Jones-Tarver and the buy for Castillo-Corrales suffered. Boxing fans decided that if they were going to part with $50, they might as well pay for Jones-Tarver.
Showtime's strategy of emphasizing weight divisions has prove successful as new stars have emerged in struggles for supremacies. In additional, some European stars such as Ricky Hatton has come forward to entice American audiences and build their own reputation. Showtime is about to present the Joe Calzaghe and Jeff Lacy fight in March. This could be one of the best fights of the year, but by covering the Super Middleweights, Showtime successfully marketed this fight.
Cruiserweights are also a success story as great fights after great fights have happened in the ring when top cruisers collide. Long dormant, the Cruiserweights are beginning to attract the attention of boxing fans. By featuring top fights in the division, Showtime is attracting fans to the Cruiserweight division. Never underestimate the power of great fights attracting boxing fans.
HBO has taken another task by highlighting stars. The problem with this strategy is that you better have some young superstars ready to replace the featured older stars. In the Middleweight, HBO has Jermain Taylor but there is no guarantee that Taylor will have a long reign as champion. With stars such as Oscar De La Hoya and Roy Jones at the end of their careers, HBO has to find stars to replace these fighters. This strategy is high risk and while HBO has shown some great fights like Gatti-Ward, there have been some real dogs as well. Presently, Showtime's strategy is working better since many of HBO's stars are nearing the end of their careers.
Another important strategy is a weekly boxing sport show that panders to both the hardcore boxing fans and the casual fans. Personal stories along with features on upcoming fights and fighters will go a long to stress the best of the sport. One of the biggest failures of boxing is to underscore the international aspect of the sport. With the collapse of the Berlin wall and the Soviet Empire downfall, Europe has become a hotbed of great boxing. Boxers that stayed amateurs for long period are now joining the professional rank. While Jeff Lacy is preparing for his fight with Calzaghe, the best 168-pound fighter in the world may be Mikkel Kessler and Arthur Abraham is another young hard charging star in the Middleweight division. Most American boxing fans do not know even know that these fighters exist.
In the beginning of the history in boxing, big matches were made due to public support. Right now, many European fighters can stay in Europe and don’t need to come across Atlantic Ocean to fight American fighters. The Lacy-Calzaghe confrontation came as a result of Lacy's willingness to fight Calzaghe in his backyard and the amount of money involved in staging the bout across the ocean.
A weekly boxing show will introduce boxing fans to these unknown fighters and maybe build the excitement for some intriguing fights. Right now, the only real studio show is ESPN Friday night fights, which combines a studio shows with live boxing action. There could even be several boxing shows. Remember that cable has open up new stations and more stations mean more opportunities to produce boxing shows.
Golf and Tennis have their own cable networks. These shows contains features on their stars and cover many of the smaller events. Someone in the sport of Boxing should consider copying Golf and Tennis, and start up their own network. The station could add more coverage of boxing stars and cover various boxing matches missed by other broadcast stations.
Boxing has their problems, but boxing is not the only sport with declining numbers. Most sports including football have seen a decline in market share. After losing a full season to a strike, Hockey is now shown on the Outdoor Living Network. Hockey is now the invisible sport. Right now, Boxing has a bigger pecking order position over Hockey. Would you rather be on ESPN2 or OLN?
Most sports have become niches sports and only Basketball, baseball and Football have the appeal to all section and demographics. While Golf and NASCAR have proven success on television, they still rank behind the big three. Hockey has always drawn well in arenas but suffered on television. While some have claimed that Hockey is simply bad sport for television, another reason is that hockey has a limited crowd appeal. The failure of Hockey on television is as much due to hockey being a niche sport with little appeal beyond its base.
Boxing has become a niche sport so the key goal is to increase it's base. Boxing may never capture it's past popularity, it could at least reverse part of it's decline.
As a sport, it has all the aspects of a successful sport - drama, violence, sexy card girls, and action. The knockout is the most dramatic moment in boxing. Boxing is the only sport where an athlete can score the equivalent of 10 runs in the last round and win with just one punch. Just one punch is all that is required to change a fight from winning or losing. There is no reason for boxing not to be more popular.