Boxing and the Klitschkos are more popular in Europe

From ESPN.com: • The Klitschko brothers may not be able to gain much traction in the U.S., but the heavyweight title-holding brothers are stars in Germany, their adopted home country. Vitali Klitschko's title defense last Saturday, a ninth-round knockout of Juan Carlos Gomez in Stuttgart, was a huge hit in Germany. Besides a sellout crowd of 12,500, an astonishing 11.5 million television viewers watched it on RTL. That translates to 55 percent of the people watching TV at that time in Germany, Team Klitschko announced. To put it in perspective, HBO's Feb. 28 broadcast of the Juan Manuel Marquez-Juan Diaz lightweight championship fight drew about 1.6 million viewers in the U.S. I think a big reason for the decline in the popularity of boxing in the US and Canada is the poor media coverage. Not only are the biggest fights not on cable or free TV, we have very negative boxing commentators like Teddy Atlas, Steve Farhood and Wally Matthews, who turn the average viewer away. They are always complaining about one thing or another, or discrediting the fighters they don't like. In contrast, the American MMA announcers tend to create excitement by being very positive and sounding excited about the fights. And the boxing commentators in Germany don't bash and discredit the Klitschkos the way Teddy Atlas and Max Kellerman always do.