According to the Irish writer Edna O’Brien, August is a wicked month. It is also, in boxing terms, a slow month, a dull month, and a month in which the sport takes stock, loosens its belt, and prepares to go again in September.
Not all that long ago August was a dead month in boxing. Very little, if anything, ever happened in the month of August and most in the sport accepted this as a known fact. As a result, promoters would feel free to disappear on holiday, boxers would cut corners and let their hair down, and those in the media had fewer stories to report and even fewer fights to watch.
Then, several years ago, August started to become a little busier. Promoters, it seemed, remembered that it contained 31 days and that within these 31 days fights could be staged and money could be made. It wasn’t so easy to make money in boxing anymore, you see, and therefore promoters, and indeed fighters, required all 12 months of the year, not just 11. Soon fights were taking place in August and holidays became weekend getaways rather than stretched to a fortnight. It suggested a renewed enthusiasm for the sport on the part of those involved. Really, though, it owed more to panic, desperation, and necessity.
Now, in the year of 2025, we have something in the middle. There have been fights – some good ones at that – but still August tends to be dominated more by news than what takes place in the ring. For instance, August 2025 will be remembered, rightly or wrongly, as the month in which Jake Paul, a novice cruiserweight, announced a Netflix exhibition bout with Gervonta Davis, a lightweight world champion. That was the most covered news story of the month and it grabbed far more attention than any fight, or even the two tragic deaths which occurred in Tokyo, Japan on August 2.
Of course, none of this comes as any great surprise. August, after all, is not only a wicked month, but a month in which children run amok and cause parents all manner of headaches before returning to school in early September. For as long as they are unleashed, these kids, everybody feels the brunt of their newfound freedom. Shopping malls become busier, establishments become noisier, and cinema bills are all of a sudden dominated by superhero movies, animated movies, and pointless remakes designed to numb rather than stimulate. In August, one must accept that things will get a little childish.
As for September, that’s usually busy in ways August never is. It’s then that children go back to school and fights – big ones – start to again fill the boxing calendar and shake the sport awake. This September, for example, we have the long-awaited fight between Saul “Canelo” Alvarez and Terence Crawford on September 13, which will be shown on Netflix, the home of Jake Paul. On that same night, in Belfast, Lewis Crocker and Paddy Donovan will reunite six months after their controversial first encounter, which ended with Donovan disqualified for hitting Crocker after the bell to end round eight. This time around Crocker and Donovan will contest the IBF welterweight title dumped by Jaron Ennis. Oh, and it doesn’t end there either. That same weekend Naoya Inoue, arguably the most exciting fighter on the planet, defends his various junior-featherweight belts against Murodjon Akhmadaliev in Japan.
Impressed? You should be. That weekend alone will make up for the slowness of August and bring boxing – proper boxing – as close as it has been to the mainstream for a while. And yet, despite this promise, one cannot help but wonder how the rest of the month of September will shape up, or indeed how the rest of the year shapes up. Because, for as good as that second weekend in September looks on paper, there can be no denying now that the makeup of the boxing calendar has changed in recent years and that the only thing consistent about it is the fact that August remains a relatively quiet month. Forget structure, the second half of the year is now often filled with the odd tentpole event in Riyadh or a UK football stadium surrounded, sporadically, by much smaller events watched by crowds getting smaller each year. That’s it. That’s your lot.
It mirrors, in that sense, what is going on in cinemas today. There, at the movies, you have the big-budget superhero fare, which keeps cinemas afloat, and you have the arthouse fare, which is true to the craft but only a few people will ever pay to watch. There is then this giant chasm between the two – the Marvel movies and the cheap, independent ones – that is never filled because filling it requires risks being taken. It is in that middle ground – whether we’re talking mid-budget films, or mid-sized arena fights – that the dice must be rolled and financiers and promoters earn their corn. It’s for exactly that reason this brand of fight, or film, has now become an endangered species.
“It’s just a weird, weird time,” Josh Warrington said in a revealing interview with Tris Dixon this week. “It’s like we've got all these big, massive Saudi shows going on, a lot of money pumped in – rightly so, the boxers up and down deserve it – but in the same breath, the bit of the stable… the bit of the backbone that’s been created over the last 10, 15 years, it’s kind of just dwindled away, you know, where we used to see shows every month, sometimes numerous times a month, in stadiums up and down the country with a big headliner, a big chief support, and a few domestic titles on the card. It’s kind of gone quiet. It’s almost like no one really knows what’s going to happen next, really.”
When he talks of an absence, what Warrington is clearly referring to are those medium-sized arena shows on which stars were traditionally built. In Britain, in particular, these are dying out and going with them, sadly, is the once-coveted ticket-seller. Not only that, for as long as promoters can be kept afloat by Marvel movies and still show their “artistic integrity” with some occasional risk-free, arthouse fodder, it is hard to see why or how these medium-sized events will return on even a semi-regular basis. They cost money, after all. They also need selling. Lots of it. They require promoters to actually promote.
Without these kinds of events, the perception of the sport changes – and not in a good way. Just as it’s possible the cinema-going experience will be associated only with superhero movies by future generations, because that’s all they ever saw growing up, there is a possibility, too, that the next generation of boxing fans will associate boxing only with exhibition bouts between famous people or inaccessible fights in the Middle East.
Just recently, in fact, a friend of mine asked me, with total sincerity, whether boxing, the sport itself, was – and I quote – still happening. It was said just like that; like it was a festival, or some sort of tournament. Why? Because, to them, the spectre of Jake Paul, Tommy Fury and the like had become so large, they were no longer able to follow or understand what was going on in boxing beyond that. They knew, for instance, that Jake Paul had beaten Mike Tyson and some Mexican fella called Chavez, but that, in their eyes, was all that had really “happened” in the sport in the past 12 months.
That is no fault of Jake Paul’s, by the way – nor the fault of anyone under the impression boxing has died. It serves only as a reminder to not be so naïve when people within the sport claim it has never been in a better place or healthier without actually offering you valid reasons as to why. It also flies in the face of the ridiculous notion that just because people outside the sport are aware that famous men like Jake Paul choose to box from time to time there will suddenly be a whole wave of new fans attaching themselves to the sport and driving it forward.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that and it never will. The reality is, an audience member into live-action remakes of animated classics or superhero movies does not suddenly develop a taste for the works of Bergman or Fellini, or even Scorsese, just because they all play out on a big screen in a dark room. Some, from a past generation, may switch lanes and dabble, sure, but any youngster who recognises crash-bang-wallop as their first language will know and understand nothing else.
If anything, too, the constant pushing and consuming of the easy stuff will only diminish the attention given to and appreciation of the harder stuff. Regardless of its commercial appeal, pushing the easy stuff does no more than reduce art to a commodity, sport to entertainment, and its audience to consumers. It also makes news aggregators of journalists and it makes world-class boxers consider fighting novices with large online followings just to remain relevant and start making “influencer money”.
Between all that and the gifting of the best scripts to Riyadh, it’s almost as if those running the sport see more value in consumers than fans and feel that long-term thinking just gets in the way of the fun. It’s almost as if August, a month of indolence and uncertainty, never ends.
Some might even call it a year-long season.
