Boxing in the 21st Century: The First Decade
By Patrick Kehoe
On January 2, 2000, the Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act was passed into US law as an updated reversion of the 1996 Professional Boxing Safety Act. Call it political incrementalism, postured symbolism or a necessary step toward responsible regulatory oversight of professional boxing within the United States of America, the tide of optimism engendered corresponded to the investigative assertions being detailed, mainly by web-based boxing writers, at the dawning of this millennium.
Even if only a recycled refrain, “Boxing Reform” became, in 2001 and 2002, a clarion call shouted by boxing scribes as diverse as Bernard Fernandez, Thomas Hauser, Charles Jay and yours very, very truly. Promoters from west to east, from Gary Shaw to Lou DiBella, were quick to go on the record to describe the necessity for a new “transparency” to illuminate and thus deconstruct both the behind the scenes “little black bags of money” leveraging status quo, and, the WBC, WBA, IBF, WBO, etc., alphabetized road-mapping to NO-where, known as championship governance, for the endangered sport and business of boxing.
The International Boxing Federation (IBF) scandal came to trial, ring death of Randy Carver, the maelstroms known as Mike Tyson and Ike Ibeabuchi were however sadly potential, and foreshadowed a difficult decade for boxing as marketable mass entertainment. True, the featherweight triumvirate of Eric Morales, Marco Antonio Barrera and Juan Manuel Marquez, heroic figures such as Arturo Gatti, Micky Ward and Manny Pacquiao did provide illuminating highlights, just as Floyd Mayweather and Joe Calzaghe provided typologies of original ring genius, in their respective defences of perfection. In the post-Lennox Lewis and Evander Holyfield era of the Klitschko brothers, heavyweight boxing never did reassert itself as the gleaming mantle for sports greatest title designation. As far as the average sports fan was concerned boxing had fallen off the proverbial radar screen of ‘must see’ sports programming.
And despite the work of Alex Ramos and Gerry Cooney to provide for retirement securities for aged ring figures, protecting the novice battler from exploitation, the seasoned campaigner from manipulation and the infirmed relic from obliteration never became a vested right within the business of boxing nor a benchmark for promotional conscience and managerial obligation. Many talked honour and doing the right thing by those that have built the tradition of boxing; yet, boxing remained as Darwinian as ever. Still, even sceptics had to admit that with the coming of entities such as Golden Boy Promotions, perhaps, at least, the work of ‘fair practice’ was begun and hope, renewed.
As boxing’s mainstream sporting visibility faded with Mike Tyson and Oscar De La Hoya in post-prime pay per view cash grabbing mismatches, television’s mediation and complicity continued to facilitate the governing bodies hegemony over championship boxing EVEN as they often criticised their sanctioning fee omnipotence of boxing during ‘on air’ monologues; the post-modern media are always at the ready to exploit, as scandal or threat or virus, that which it celebrates, amplifies and de-contextualizes for the sake of ratings share and sponsorship.
Predictably, television executives in North America and across Europe wanted fighters to become reality ‘stars’ for the sake of minor celebrity comodification for sporting notice, understanding that to be a boxing champion, in 2000 and beyond, was almost to be ‘invisible’ when compared to a top NFL, NBA, NHL or mega club soccer player.
Boxing’s one night of critical mass – the big fight night – kept afloat the elite level of the sport, with pay per view ratings allowing cable entities from HBO to Showtime to retain boxing as a conditionally marketable ‘entertainment package’ as ‘violent content viewing/programming.’ The traditional hierarchy of the sport – boxing champions as the best of a divisional pyramid – had dissolved in a two decade long devolution of politics as ethics, within all the major governing bodies ‘sanctioning’ of championship boxing, each of which doled out title belts and ratings standings based on a complex formula of future profitability, promotional alliances, name or regional recognition marketability and trending ring competence.
Only at the close of this decade, with Mixed Martial Arts commanding generational attentions did boxing offer up a ‘rush into production’ of the best fighting the best. Suddenly boxing champions, belt holders and top contenders were finding contracts suitable, foreign venues amenable and their career dance cards free to ‘take on the best’ no matter the weight limit or stylistic threat before them. Where ‘mandatory contender’ status had dominated the infighting of managerial and promotional oscillations in the 1980s and 1990s, ‘fight or perish’ finally became the ethic of standard boxing business practice under the threat of corporate media pressure and Ultimate Fighting popularity.
Superstar careers soared and plummeted rebounded and crashed, as with Roy Jones, Arturo Gatti, Diego Corrales, Vernon Forrest and Miguel Cotto. Bernard Hopkins showed his glorious pseudo-geriatric endurance and the limitations of his bullying bravado defeating reigning middleweight king Kelly Pavlik, though coming up second best to the great Joe Calzaghe. James Toney, Antonio Tarver, Vic Darchinyan and Hopkins and Jones, Inc., berated us, preaching always upon the majesty of their respective magnificence with mind numbing oratories. Wladimir and Vitali Klitschko proved that not all great fighters were forced to fight their best opposition, and that boxing could still hold in suspension the final deliberation of a division’s ultimate destiny; because the two best heavyweights since Lennox Lewis would not fight. Their house, they proclaimed, shall not be divided against itself, no matter the consequence to boxing’s most storied division.
What was cast aside was the casual fan, which had supported baseline boxing cards in major cities across the world throughout the 20th Century, even after the advent of televised prizefighting, which had destroyed the traditional club fight scene by 1955-60. Newspaper and magazine editors red lined boxing, the sports page presence all but disappeared from ‘print’ coverage; it was this vacuum which the online, web boxing revolution filled over the past decade. Despite the epic career closures of Mike Tyson and Lennox Lewis and Roy Jones and Eric Morales, etc., the cultural centrality of being a warrior of the ring was increasingly a theatrical designation, aligned with the spectacle cartooning, re-created by the WWF, then by the middle of the decade, the hand to hand and take down barbarity known as MMA and Ultimate Fighting.
Increasingly, boxing struggled to represent mainstream martial combat for the rabid sporting masses, with extreme formations of all out combat simulating the virtual ‘gamesphere’ in a manner that younger and younger audiences identified with, on an almost psychotropic level.
The ‘myth-arch’ of traditional boxing legends from Jack Johnson and Jack Dempsey and “Sugar” Ray Robinson to Muhammad Ali, Roberto Duran and Oscar De La Hoya were founded on literary descriptors (note: they were all subjects of biographies in the 2000s), cultural markings, historical and racial memory, technical innovations and athletic singularity over time. The marriage of the artistic and the brutal, athletic exceptionalism and passionate determination against all odds be they economic, geographic or domestic remains boxing’s signature offering as a dreamscape for reinvention of the single figure wilful enough to fight for glory and riches.
Yet in the nanosecond slipstream of data transmissions, all that matters to those craving reality violence is the momentous effect, the raging, combusted, crush or be crushed end-time of the final submission rampage to pulverize and extinguish threat, and in that formula MMA’s currency resides as media product.
Boxers such as Roy Jones, Vernon Forrest, Joe Calzaghe, Marco Antonio Barrera, Floyd Mayweather, Juan Manuel Marquez, Winky Wright, Bernard Hopkins, Laila Ali and Amir Khan showed that the technical legacy of mastering the craft of intricate hand to hand prizefighting has not been lost in this age of carnage combat.
Sports fans have only to summon memory or an online video file to see Antonio Tarver’s sublime left cross land against Roy Jones to see the reflexive pattern of perfection boxing can still generate as entertainment possibility. We have the full prime careers of Manny Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather coming to a supreme climax; who can truly predict what that will finally mean for sporting history! With the plat-forming of Showtime, the super-middleweights are set to redefine tournament rituals for supremacy of the fittest in 2010-2011. The entire globe seems to be the farm system for boxing’s next grouping of mega-stars, with Montreal and London burgeoning boxing Mecca’s.
The spectre of steroid use and abuse touched down briefly during the decade, though the full measuring of that infection has yet to be aired or investigated.
No question, boxing has a way to go to once again produce champions on par with Muhammad Ali, “Sugar” Ray Robinson and Oscar De La Hoya – household names – then again the enterprise of our reality seldom contains all the dreams of deepest longings immediately.
And so they come, men and women of every colour, one by one into the gym, then the ring, daring fate and good fortune, alert to the fact that danger is their primal business. Boxing endures, suffering all of its practiced self abuses and needless folly, though still filled with the promise of producing splendid infernos of competitive action, under the blaze of the ring lights and the gaze of millions, to the astonishment of hastening fate.
