For better or worse, there’s no other sport quite like boxing. And I think we can chalk it up as a “worse” that a fight that exists far outside boxing’s meaningful competitive landscape, Gervonta “Tank” Davis vs. Jake Paul, is drawing magnitudes more interest than any current pairing of elite practitioners with championships at stake.

That doesn’t happen in other, healthier sports.

World Series games last year averaged 15.8 million viewers across all Fox platforms.

That’s almost 19 times what the Bananas game did.

It makes sense – the marquee event at the highest level of the sport is a far more popular attraction than the unserious “sports-entertainment” event, even if that unserious event is gathering steam.

That’s a sign of a sport that is reasonably healthy.

This year’s NBA Dunk Contest averaged a reported 3.4 million viewers across TNT and TruTV, whereas the NBA Finals, in a down year without large-market teams, averaged 10.2 million viewers.

The gap between those numbers is smaller than in the baseball example, but still, clearly, the championship-level games matter to more people than the silly basketball-adjacent spectacles.

That’s a sign of a sport that still has a sizable audience.

Neither MLB nor the NBA is anywhere near as healthy as the NFL – where the average 2024 regular-season game drew almost 28 times the TV audience of a typical 2025 game in the “rival” UFL – but they’re both doing OK. The numbers indicate their core products matter to a significant share of the American public.

That Gervonta Davis has elected to fight Jake Paul next, and that this fight between a 200lbs YouTuber and a 135lbs titleholder is what gets Netflix to open up its checkbook, is sending us the opposite message about the health of the sport of boxing.

If boxing qualified as a thriving sport, if it had a large enough fan base to financially support real fights with regularity, an exhibition bout like Davis vs. Paul wouldn’t be happening. Or, at least, it would be a one-off oddity, not part of a recurring trend.

It’s instructive to drop in the enduringly perfect Larry Merchant quote here: “Nothing will kill boxing, and nothing can save it.” Indeed, no matter how many awful things Davis vs. Paul may suggest about the state of the sport, boxing is in no danger of going away.

But with increasing regularity, the sideshow is becoming the main show.

And it’s time to seriously consider that boxing is now much closer to the “killed” end of the spectrum than it is to the “saved” side. That “Tank” and “The Problem Child” are fighting each other this November is proof of that.

I don’t mean to be entirely negative. I still love this sport when it’s at its best. There are meaningful fights being made all the time, true warriors engaging in thrillers fairly regularly, spectacular knockouts, dramatic upsets. Scroll no further back for evidence than Saturday night’s junior middleweight fight in Orlando between Abass Baraou and Yoenis Tellez, in which a knockdown with 10 seconds left on the clock secured a dramatic victory for the underdog. 

And the global talent pool remains tremendous. I can name about 50 active boxers off the top of my head whose fights I refuse to miss.

But an entertaining sport and a healthy sport are not the same thing.

Paul has frequently described himself as and been described as a “disruptor,” and, boy oh boy, has boxing proven easy for him to disrupt.

From last November 15 to this November 14, Paul will have featured in probably the two most publicized, most mainstream, and quite possibly most watched boxing matches in that 365-day span. And both are/were absurd exhibitions, whether officially labeled as such or not. He fought a 58-year-old heavyweight in Mike Tyson and is about to take on a 30-year-old lightweight in Davis.

In between, he was paid an estimated $8-10 million to face a completely used-up 39-year-old Julio Cesar Chavez Jnr, who has since become more famous for his arrest and deportation than for anything he ever did in a boxing ring.

It’s not just Paul. MMA fighter Francis Ngannou was able to briefly disrupt heavyweight boxing in 2023 and ’24, occupying the time of both then-lineal champ Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua. 

Meanwhile, in between Paul-Tyson and Paul-Davis, the heavyweight champion of the world, Oleksandr Usyk, has turned away Fury and knocked out Daniel Dubois, both in exciting rematches that further cemented Usyk’s status as an all-time great. Usyk has found things to do at heavyweight that don’t involve former UFC champs. Real boxing keeps chugging along.

But those Usyk fights, while massive in Europe and around the globe, aired on pay-per-view in the U.S. – and I don’t think any of us want to know how vast the gulf is between the number of Americans who watched Paul dance with Tyson and the number who saw either of Usyk’s fights. (Or who could even name the reigning heavyweight champ, for that matter.)

That boxing is not a mainstream sport is nothing new – it’s been a “niche” or “cult” sport in America for as long as I’ve been covering it, with the capability to pop into the mainstream two or three times a year.

But the cult must be steadily shrinking if Jake Paul is now able to headline boxing’s biggest events and divert actual elite boxers like Davis away from meaningful bouts.

And, yes, I am well aware that Muhammad Ali took on Antonio Inoki back when the sport was far more mainstream and healthy, and George Foreman fought five opponents in one night in that same era. Sideshow fights happening here and there is not, all by itself, proof that boxing is sickly.

But, again, there’s a difference between “occasional” and “frequent.” There’s a point at which it becomes a trend. There’s a point at which, even if you don’t believe boxing is in full-on crisis mode, you at least have to acknowledge that this is getting worrisome.

Even the biggest “real” fight on the current calendar smacks of a little desperation from promoters. The top North American star of his era, Saul “Canelo” Alvarez, faces Terence “Bud” Crawford on September 13 in a battle of pound-for-pound-elite future Hall of Famers … who happen to be two weight classes apart.

It’s a great fight on paper. It’s a fascinating matchup that’s drawing a variety of opinions and predictions. But you have to admit, a guy who has fought as high as 175lbs against one who has only fought once above 147lbs has at least a vague whiff of freak show to it. (And I say this as someone who has been leaning all along toward picking the smaller Crawford to win.)

Between now and November, the Netflix subscriber base is going to answer major questions about the state of boxing with a pair of numbers.

Which fight is going to attract more viewers: Alvarez-Crawford or Paul-Davis?

Neither will rate as strongly as Paul-Tyson (supposedly 108 million live global viewers), and both will do better than Netflix’s other venture into live boxing, Katie Taylor-Amanda Serrano III (reportedly 6 million live global viewers). Each of these upcoming fights on the Netflix calendar will land squarely in between.

But which will draw bigger ratings? The legit superfight for the super middleweight championship of the world? Or the wacky exhibition between the disruptor and the disrupt-ee?

I think most of us have the same sinking feeling about what the answer is likely to be.

One fight appeals primarily to boxing fans. One fight appeals primarily to non-boxing fans.

Is there any question which of those two factions is bigger?

In his interview last weekend with BoxingScene’s Kieran Mulvaney, Paul spun his successful invasion of boxing as a positive.

“Boxing needed to be changed and done differently, and that’s how I always saw it,” Paul said. “The analogy I use is, boxing was a taxi and we’re Uber, and we’re putting on fights that people actually want to see, and they keep on getting bigger and bigger and bigger.”

Evolution or devolution? That’s the fundamental question. And the answer, of course, can be “both.” Boxing has often been reflective of society at large, and that remains the case, with the disruptors taking advantage of weaknesses in the system for their own gain, while the old guard proves powerless to stop it.

It’s not just Paul-Davis that tells us boxing is on shaky ground. Look at the non-Netflix, non-pay-per-view broadcasting picture. In the U.S., for the most part, there isn’t one. ESPN is out, and Top Rank doesn’t have a new home yet. Even in the U.K., where the sport is healthier than it is in America, the longtime major boxing broadcasters, Sky Sports and TNT, have yet to announce any boxing scheduling for next year.

Meanwhile, the UFC is out there signing a $7.7 billion – yes, “billion” with a “b” – media rights deal that will take most of the product off of pay-per-view and make the biggest events much more affordable.

And this is happening while boxing’s powers-that-be keep claiming they’re done with PPV – only to put every significant non-Netflix fight on PPV. DAZN even asked customers who are already paying $225 a year for the app to pay extra for Moses Itauma vs. Dillian Whyte, the end result of which is that hardly anybody in the U.S. saw Itauma do his thing in real time.

The Saudi General Entertainment Authority connected its money faucet to boxing, resulting in high-demand fights being made left and right, but somehow boxing fans are spending more money than ever to keep up with the sport, even after eliminating HBO and Showtime fees from their monthly bills.

I’m reminded as I survey the state of boxing now of the scene in Almost Famous when Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Lester Bangs tells William, the young, aspiring rock critic at the film’s center, “You got here just in time for the death rattle.”

The movie is set in 1973 – in hindsight, still very much part of the golden age of rock and roll (and, incidentally, the absolute golden age for heavyweight boxing).

More than 50 years down the road, rock and roll still lives. The fictional version of Bangs (and the real-life version, if he said it) was wrong.

Sort of.

The truth is that rock music has lived outside the cultural mainstream for about the last 30 years.

Nothing will kill boxing. But the announcement of Jake Paul vs. Tank Davis came with the shaking of a rattle. A deafening, depressing rattle for all of us who love boxing as a genuine sport.

Eric Raskin is a veteran boxing journalist with nearly 30 years of experience covering the sport for such outlets as BoxingScene, ESPN, Grantland, Playboy, and The Ring (where he served as managing editor for seven years). He also co-hosted The HBO Boxing Podcast, Showtime Boxing with Raskin & Mulvaney, The Interim Champion Boxing Podcast with Raskin & Mulvaney, and Ring Theory. He has won three first-place writing awards from the BWAA, for his work with The Ring, Grantland, and HBO. Outside boxing, he is the senior editor of CasinoReports and the author of 2014’s The Moneymaker Effect. He can be reached on X, BlueSky, or LinkedIn, or via email at RaskinBoxing@yahoo.com.