Boxing and "Marketability"

After the Diaz - Malignaggi fight Max Kellerman brought up marketability. Are we now seeing more often, and blatantly, the effect marketability has on a fights outcome and what fights ultimately get made? Is it a new "intangible" that a boxer must have to become a champion or to even get a fight in the first place? Did the "powers that be" of boxing basically tell Guzman and Funeka last night, "sorry, neither of you are what we're looking for to fill our vacancy, but we'll keep you on file. Thank you for coming. NEXT!" Guys like Paulie Malignaggi, Joan Guzman, Ali Funeka, Joshua Clottey, and Glen Johnson aren't what you would call mainstream, but they're tough and will give anyone a tough fight. Why should they have to bend over and take it from boxing because they're not "marketable." Lets take Joshua Clottey for example. He last fought Miguel Cotto in June in what was a close fight. The following months were filled with on again off again news about upcoming fights for Clottey only for a Dec. 5th fight with Carlos Quintana to be ultimately called off entirely. Then you have a guy in Chris Arreola who was pummeled by Vitali Klitschko in September and made a spectacle of himself and he gets Clottey's HBO spot. I get that the Clottey- Quintana fight was off due to the Pavlik pull out, but it always seems to be the same types of people getting screwed and that the "powers that be" don't even think twice about having to screw the less "marketable" guys over and favoring the more "marketable" ones. Is boxing's behind the scenes favoritism becoming more and more transparent?

Comments (4)

OnePunch1099

Imagine if they did that in other sports. Imagine last year when Arizona made it to the Super bowl, if the NFL told them "you guys had a good run, but Dallas does better ratings so you're out and they're in". lol

16y ago

The_Dreamer

It's nothing new, it's always been like that. The large number of titles makes it a little better for the fighters since the less marketable, high-risk/low-reward fighters have more titles to choose from and can use a title as a marketing tool. But it's still often hard to get the big fights with the big names. Right, but has the favoritism always seemed as blatant as it seems to be now? I've been watching boxing since the early 90's, granted not as closely as I've been following it the past few years. It just seems that everything is more transparent these days. It's like the heads of boxing don't have the confidence that boxing can work itself out naturally so they have to guide it every so often to where they want it to go for "the good" of the sport despite some casualties. You always read "___ is good for boxing" "___ is bad for boxing." Before the Haye - Valuev fight you read a lot of "Haye is good for boxing" "Valuev is bad for boxing" stuff and you see it for a lot of other fights. To me, boxing at the top level is like a proud person's front lawn. It's out there for everyone to see so they put a lot of work into it to keep it neatly landscaped and presentable looking. Boxing at the top level is out there for everyone to see. So are the head honchos of boxing just keeping it neatly landscaped and presentable with this marketability business? Do some "weeds" spring up every so often and they just have to lend a helping hand to keep their prized "lawn" nice and healthy? I think so.

16y ago

Kunty_McPhuck

I'll go a step further and say maketability helps the judging on some fights, especially if a fighter is a) unbeaten, b) up and coming & c) has charisma or all the above alot of the time, they get decisions when really it looks clear to most that they lost the fight. Take David Haye I thought he lost to Valuev I had Valuev a couple rounds up, but yet Haye won for doing pretty much what Dirrell did only a few weeks earlier. When have you ever heard of a foreign fighter getting a pts win against a German based fighter, hardly, but Haye did. To me the only way Haye got that win in Germany, because there is money in it for Germany with the Klitschko's and the UK & US markets so everyone gets to eat on a much bigger scale that wouldn't of happened if Valuev had won. There are other instances like Floyd/Castillo, 1 Taylor/Hopkins 1 (Lets be real, there aint no money in a Hopkins fight plus he had been champ for 10 years,) they needed a change and Taylor up to that point of his career looked to be the next big 160/168 star)

16y ago

Thread_Stealer

16y ago