Forget about Ring Magazine from now on

[fitefanSHO]

Sounds like a job opportunity to me!

[StarshipTrooper]

For what it is worth I have always liked and respected Doug Fischer (if he is the new editor).

What I've never been comfortable with is a magazine (especially one so highly regarded) being owned by a boxing promotional company. That just screams conflict of interest. It would be like if the ********** Party owned Fox News.

Or the Dems owned CNN

[SCtrojansbaby]

I think Ring mag will be better with Doug Fischer

[Mr Gruber]

I don't read the magazine. As it's operated under Oscar's banner, it's probably not very objective. But FWIW, I'll still take the Ring's title belt as more credible than the governing body belts.

[LeG00N]

The Ring Belt > every other belt

[PunchesNbuncheS]

The Ring Belt > every other belt

I agree.
I also hold the lineal claim to a division in high regard.

[TBear]

I have been reading the Ring for so long and seen it go through so many changes that I quit buying it & subscribing over a year ago. If you want see a good magazine get you hands on a ring from the early 80's and before. Back then they spent more time on fight coverage and even had an extensive section that gave indepth details of all the bouts around the world. Probably the closest thing to it the last time I checked was International Boxing Digest. The Ring in the 80's became more like a People Magazine when it was bought out and became the same as KO and World Boxing which were owned by the same company. But the reason I quit subsribing was more due to the fact I could get fight details and news from the internet and unlike the magazines it was not three months old.

But who knows, a change in the magazine might be the best thing for the struggling publication. I just don't know with the internet available and them asking 9.00$ a copy how they can make it any more successful.

[RubenSonny]

I agree.
I also hold the lineal claim to a division in high regard.

For the most part the ring belt has been the lineal claim, save from a few occasions (e.g. Vitali Klitschko being champ).

[fitefanSHO]

Good-Bye to All That: Golden Boy Promotions Takes The Ring South
By Carlos Acevedo

After an association of nearly 35 years with The Ring, Nigel Collins has been fired as editor-in-chief of the magazine by Golden Boy Promotions. The Ring office in Pennsylvania has been shut down and the operation will now move to Los Angeles, where GBP has its corporate headquarters. Doug Fischer, currently co-editor of Ring TV.com, will take over the magazine, and its new direction is a troubling detour on the way to who knows where.

Although it has been considered an institution since 1922, it should be noted that the sanctity of The Ring has been–and always was–largely overstated. Its first ratings were compiled by a promoter (Tex Rickard) and throughout the years, The Ring employed managers, agents, and publicists as writers (including Bill Miller, Eddie Borden and Jersey Jones).

Nat Fleischer himself often had a “see nothing, hear nothing, say nothing” approach to a profession that doubled as the playground of the underworld. Obvious hoaxes like the Fox-LaMotta and Saxton-Gavilan fights were defended as legitimate contests in The Ring, and his friendship with the leading promoter of the day, Mike Jacobs, apparently involved willfully ignoring the fact that Frankie Carbo pulled enough strings on Jacobs to make “Uncle Mike’s” dentures rattle. You would never know by reading The Ring that Frankie Carbo, Legs Diamond, Owney “The Killer” Madden, Waxey Gordon, Al Capone, Mickey Cohen, Champ Segal, and Dutch Schultz all owned pieces of prizefighters in those days. Fleischer also judged and refereed several bouts, as blatant a conflict of interest as can be imagined.

By the mid-1960s, The Ring was an abysmal bore, written in a style more appropriate for a fin de siecle issue of the Pall Mall Gazette. Victorian prose battled with Victorian mores during the turbulent “Summer of Love” era–where you could still read about “Negroes” in The Ring–and when the 1970s sputtered into view, the magazine symbolically mirrored the decade—it was running on empty. Then came the ABC/U.S. Championships scandal–with an outsized cast of characters, including convicted murderer Don King, amoral Al Braverman, foul-mouthed Paddy Flood, unscrupulous Johnny Ort, doddering Nat Loubet, and neurotic Mark Kram–and The Ring appeared to be down for the count for good. Enter Bert Sugar in 1979, with Dave DeBusschere in tow as an investor, and perhaps the greatest run in boxing magazine history began.

Sugar may have published the work of Dave Anderson, Barney Nagler, Red Smith, Vic Ziegel, Michael Katz, Bob Waters, W.C. Heinz, Jerry Izenberg, A.J. Leibling, Bill Gallo and Jack Fiske, but he nearly ran the magazine into the ground with an accounting system based, apparently, on the principles of 52 Pick-up.

In the late 1980s, with Sugar long gone, The Ring suffered its final ethical asterisk—an understandable one, at that–when Jim Jacobs, an active manager, bailed out The Ring and paid some outstanding IRS bills on behalf of the magazine. Still, The Ring floundered and nearly closed shop until Stanley Weston bought it in 1990 and made it respectable again under the editorial oversight of Steve Farhood and Jeff Ryan. Then 2007 rolled around and Golden Boy Promotions took over to great fanfare and alarm.

The Ring had been going downhill steadily over the last few months, with round card girls being interviewed and photos of fans posing with fighters being printed—certainly not in keeping with the staid editorial hand of Nigel Collins. In addition, the presence of a few internet writers of varying quality also seemed odd, as if Collins was looking for some cyberspace synergy to boost sales. Still, Collins took his role as unofficial curator of boxing history seriously, and, by all accounts, is a man of integrity, not something that can be said of many involved in boxing.

Most likely, money is the underlying issue behind this consolidation and not some nefarious plot hatched by Richard Schaefer or Oscar De La Hoya. After all, renting office space in Pennsylvania when De La Hoya owns an entire building in Los Angeles is just bad business. But if GBP personnel were actively trying to shape editorial policy, then the scenario that was implicit when Golden Boy purchased The Ring is now sadly explicit.

As for Fischer, he is a veteran internet writer of inconsistent quality whose work has been marred for years by snarkiness, arrogance, condescension, narcissism, and the thrown-together-quickly quality of what passes for writing these days on screen monitors and smart phones all over the world. In other words, not much separates him from the average blogger. And much of his work since joining Ring TV has been, without question, shilling for Golden Boy Promotions, but who can say that paper—and the hallowed reputation of The Ring—won’t bring out qualities in Fischer that cyberspace could not? Whether or not loyal readers of the magazine stick around long enough to find out is another question altogether.

There has already been a certain amount of handwringing over the future of The Ring ratings, which is somewhat silly, since any ratings system is ultimately subjective, and the insistence that The Ring ratings are superior to any other is a specious argument, since fights are made largely under the wacko au****es of sanctioning bodies and box office potential—or its second cousin, television licensing fees.

What really matters is that The Ring was an “adult” magazine, and often focused on some of the medical, moral, criminal, economical, and historical aspects of the sport. Boxing is the most serious of all sports—death, pain, morality, corruption, disease, voodoo economics—these concepts are inherent in nearly every bout, but you would never know that reading most contemporary boxing coverage, whose main focus appears to be Fantasy League gibberish and the omnipresent “I.” Possibly losing the kind of gravitas The Ring specialized in over the years would be no laughing matter. Or is that LOL?

LINK: http://thecruelestsport.com/2011/09/...he-ring-south/