By Jake Donovan
You’d have to be pretty sick to wish death upon even your worst enemy, but the truth of the matter is that the subject at least provided headlines this time a year ago.
The summer schedule was only slightly more active, but there’s no denying that there was plenty to talk about last July, even if often in the most morbid sense. The deaths of Alexis Arguello, Arturo Gatti and Vernon Forrest (among many others in a brutally fatal July 2009) sent shockwaves through the boxing world, one still reeling from the damage felt from the passing of non-boxing icons such as Michael Jackson and Steve McNair.
Thankfully, there has been no such news to report of this year, though a different kind of death lingers on – boxing fans growing bored to death with what has been offered this summer.
It’s not uncommon for boxing fans to suffer through the summer doldrums, but there’s almost always something else on which to focus our attention. Two years ago, it was the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing, China, though boxing fans’ collective fix came in the form of bitching about the way the game is played in the amateurs these days.
Last year’s lull was hardly intentional; a series of postponements and failed negotiations led to one of the longest inactive stretches of live boxing action on HBO in recent memory, with the most powerful network going nearly two months between fights during one point.
During that same period, Showtime did its best to fill the void, offering compelling fights (on paper) three weeks apart. However, the network also did its part to generate headlines with the timely announcement of the launching of the Super Six World Boxing Classic.
Where there wasn’t fire, there was at least smoke.
Thus far in 2009, all we’ve had so far is a lot of dead airtime, and not much in the way of compelling action on the nights in which boxing graced our television screens – and rarely at a decent hour these days it seems.
The trend in recent years has been for boxing personalities and writers to whine and bitch whenever outside entities insist that the sport is dying. Anytime something noteworthy comes along, we are required to bang our chests and claim that boxing is in fact thriving.
Yet we still remain the one sport that goes out of its way to alter its schedule to avoid conflicting with the biggest events of other sports.
The renewed Telefutura Solo Boxeo Tecate series already features a late start time for those on the East Coast, who have to stay up until 11:30PM just to watch the opening credits. Yet thanks to the FIFA World Cup rolling into town (so to speak), the series has aired at midnight ET.
Golden Boy CEO Richard Schaefer recently confirmed that the series will return to its normal start time once the World Cup is through. What wasn’t promised however, was the revamped series airing fights that are actually worth a damn.
There was tremendous anticipation upon the announcement earlier this year that Telefutura would be back in the boxing business. For most of the 21st Century, the Spanish-speaking network could be counted on for anywhere from 40-50 televised dates per year prior to stepping away from the boxing business late in 2008.
The network has been consistent in its coverage since returning this past April. Unfortunately, it has also been consistent in airing disinteresting fights that so far have proven to be as much of a mismatch in reality as was suggested on paper.
Predictable fights at an unfavorable hour – not exactly the way to announce your return to the sport.
Also of concern is the fact that – at least for the moment – the series has Golden Boy Promotions as its sole content provider. There has yet to be a single example of any network benefitting from an exclusive deal with a single promoter, and it’s clear that the folks in charge of running the Solo Boxeo series haven’t learned from their own mistakes. There has yet to be a broadcast since its return that doesn’t suggest the network is airing boxing just for the sake of airing boxing.
Fox Sports is trying to avoid falling into the same trap, although it seems that for every notable installment of “Top Rank Live”, there comes an absolute dud. Fernando Montiel’s bantamweight title defense against Eric Morel later this month is one of the better fights to be scheduled on the series, although the July 17 telecast comes on the heels of a July 3 show that was a dud on reality and never promised to be anything more than that on paper.
How long the series will last remains to be seen, but what’s guaranteed for the time being is that Fox Sports will be at the mercy of Top Rank.
So, too is the featherweight division, as long as the thought of a potential Juan Manuel Lopez-Yuriorkis Gamboa showdown remains little more than a carrot on a stick. The promise of such a matchup one day materializing served as the selling point for a HBO Boxing After Dark doubleheader earlier this year, with Lopez beating on Steven Luevano and Gamboa easily blasting through Rogers Mtagwa.
Any hopes of a head-on collision occurring next were immediately thwarted by promoter Bob Arum, who decided that the two weren’t going to fight until mid-2011, preferably in a stadium and after the two have all but cleaned out the featherweight division.
The course of action taken thus far suggests that such a day may never come. It’s been made abundantly clear that Celestino Caballero will not be involved in such plans. Chris John – arguably the best featherweight in the world – isn’t exactly priority one in this discussion, either.
Instead, Gamboa has been steered towards titlists Orlando Salido - who had to pull out of a July 24 date with the Cuban – and Elio Rojas, who now appears to be the opponent of choice for a September 11 HBO Boxing After Dark telecast. Lopez’ path towards the top is even less inspiring – he faces mid-range contender Bernabe Concepcion in Puerto Rico this weekend (Saturday, SHOWTIME 9PM ET), with a win leading to a September payday for a showdown with faded former two-division champion Rafael Marquez.
Such news makes it hard to believe that plans will in fact materialize for Tim Bradley and Devon Alexander to square off in the first major fight of 2011. That’s what HBO is currently selling, hoping that separate showcase bouts in the next few weeks – in which both fighters are heavy favorites to remain unbeaten - will serve as the road to such a showdown, instead of grounds for their respective promoters to outbid one another and watch yet another mouthwatering matchup fall by the wayside.
Failure in such fights materializing aren’t as great of an ordeal when there is something huge on the horizon that can overshadow such bad news. But therein lies the difference between last year’s lulls and this year’s lack of creativity.
Even with the dry spells experienced last summer, there was plenty to still look forward to. While Showtime’s two major summer telecasts weren’t as good as they appeared to be on paper, there was still the announcement of the Super Six.
HBO’s two months of nothingness was offset by the anticipated return of Floyd Mayweather Jr following a 21-month hiatus, as well as the finalizing of the welterweight showdown between Manny Pacquiao and Miguel Cotto.
This year, no such notable news exists, even if various media outlets are doing their best to create something out of nothing.
From the moment Pacquiao stopped Cotto until the time it was clear that he wouldn’t next face Mayweather, you couldn’t go a day without reading about the latest development in the negotiations – good, bad or otherwise. Both camps went hard at each other through the media, with mudslinging coming on what seemed to be an hourly basis.
With the current gag order in place for the renewed negotiations, there hasn’t been anywhere nearly as much to report. Sprinkles of news appear on a semi-regular basis, though never anything revealing. The next couple of weeks should give everyone something to talk about, at least if Top Rank’s reported deadline is to be believed.
The latest rumors have Pacquiao-Mayweather negotiations wrapped up, with everyone waiting on Mayweather to either sign on, or decide that he’s sitting out the rest of 2010 – but who’s to say for sure if that’s the real story?
Should the fight once again fall through, the contingency plan for Pacquiao seems to be either a fight with Antonio Margarito or a rematch with Cotto. The latter has been suggested only because Cotto now carries junior middleweight hardware, on the strength of his win over Yuri Foreman last month in boxing’s return to Yankee Stadium.
A better headline would’ve been the announcement of Cotto rematching Margarito, all but forcing Pacquiao and Mayweather to either face each other in November, or pursue fights that offered greater risk and less reward.
Instead, all of the aforementioned fighters are merely stuck in the same situation as the fans who follow them – waiting for big news while otherwise suffering through yet another cruel summer.
Jake Donovan is the Managing Editor of Boxingscene.com and an award-winning member of the Boxing Writers Association of America. Contact Jake at JakeNDaBox@gmail.com .
