Comments Thread For: Can Boxing's Future Include a Piece of Its Past?

[Liondw]

Boxing isn't too bad nowadays, but we need networks and promoters to work together, otherwise we will never see fights where Crawford, Spence, Thurman, Wilder and Joshua fight each other.

[Sangy]

Didn't quite nail it

The reason boxing events all began to cluster around Saturday is the rise of pay-per-view. PPV events are prohibitively expensive--for no discernible reason--which typically requires groups of friends to purchase a fight together as a group. Because PPV is something which all but requires groups to come together at one location late in the evening for viewing, the events needed to happen on weekends.

Weekend events don't pull the numbers that primetime television does, because it ALSO competes with times when people like to go out. PPV was a tool used by promoters to make more money than they could on network broadcasts. PPV was an opportunity to make the value of a fight dependent upon the promoter's ability to sell it, which gave fighters a false premise of how valuable the promoters are and how much money they should be making. On network TV the ability of a fighter determined his popularity. in the PPV era (which has killed the sport), the popularity of fighters was based on how well they were hyped in the media. Not only that, but no one wanted to PAY to see their favorite fighter lose. Imagine trying to sell a PPV Super Bowl; you couldn't, because most of the viewers don't care about those two teams, and the rest only care about one of them. That goes for boxing, the PPV tickets are sold almost entirely according to the popularity of ONE of the two fighters, and it was impossible to sell a fighter when their fans thought they would lose. The fan base of boxing shrank almost entirely as a result of these economic factors.

PBC has proven that boxing can be revived by bringing it back to prime time. It isn't perfect, but it's because it's one small piece of a much larger pie, and too many forces are pushing back against its success. Now, if we can get the fighters to push back and refuse PPV (looking at you, AJ) in favor of network television, the sport could have a proper revival. Step one is getting the biggest fights into PRIME TIME.

[Mick Higgs]

In the past the traditioinal way was to have day time contests. Let's go back to Sayers/Heenan, Fitzsimmons/Corbett, Johnson/Willard, right up tp McGuigan/Cruz. "Day time boxing is the way forward" (For one it don't upset your wife, because you have no excuse to come home late)!

[Eff Pandas]

100% I'd like to see this happening more. Hell man I used to love Tuesday Night Fights on USA & the Thursday ESPN card back in the day. There should be more shows during the week more & bigger shows. Fair play if its better to put the biggest shows on the weekend today, but I feel like there should be more playing around with the schedule then they do & see if they can make a new non-Saturday day for boxing or specific holiday-ish times for fights. There are a ton of monday off holidays or thursday + friday off days. Maybe boxing should try filling in those dates with some bigger fights & try to create a new event day for boxing.

[wildman]

I guess I am a dinosaur, but I have been a hard core fan since 1975. Boxing's big problem is that great fights used to be regularly shown on free network TV and cable networks like ESPN and USA. Then gradually all the good fights went to PPV. Networks pretty much dropped boxing, USA dropped boxing, and ESPN only shows garbage fights now most of the time. Every big fight is on some sort of pay network or streaming service. Hard to attract new fans that way. And it has caused me to just basically follow boxing results on web sites and rarely actually watch boxing any more.