Why The Sport of Boxing Has Died
Boxing is dead. You have heard this narrative before.
When the first round of great heavyweights moved on from the sport and passed the torch to Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano, Jack Dempsey remarked to Time magazine,“Boxing is not dying, it’s dead.” When Cassius Clay ascended to prominence, even before he would become Muhammad Ali, Rocky Marciano, in turn, claimed that the sport was dead. When the infamous Don King and The Ring magazine scandal hit in the late 70s and forced major television networks to stop airing professional boxing, the disappearance of boxing from accessible mainstream outlets caused many to worry that boxing would die due to financial woes and lowered popularity.
Since then a series of heavyweight fighters have ascended to the height of the sport, some popular, some unpopular, and some shrouded in controversy. But as each fighter handed off his title to the next, the major bouts became less and less frequent and without defined heavyweight contenders. All along the way, people have claimed that boxing is dead or dying. The absence of heavyweights shifted the focus to Oscar De La Hoya, Manny Pacquiao, and Floyd Mayweather, culminating in the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight in May 2015. However, there seems to be no future contender coming forward that has the pull of any of boxing’s biggest names and outlets. Like Forbes has suggested, the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight may be the last of boxing’s high earning mega-matches.
This is increasingly clear with the rise of UFC bouts that have drawn the attention of fans, as well as the fact that many fighters are increasingly seeing boxing as an alternative to MMA, not vice versa. If you need convincing that the future of boxing is bleak, Bleacher Report has a year and a half old tab on its boxing page for the May 2015 Manny Pacquiao vs Floyd Mayweather fight in the hopes that both fighters will come out of retirement for a rematch, which is looking further and further from happening with each passing day.
Cash-for-Gold
This is only a timeline of the professional boxing realm, and doesn’t take into account the corruption that has plagued both professional and amateur boxing. If you have watched Olympic boxing recently — or any year really — you may notice a plethora of questionable judging decisions, despite the fact that the scoring system for the Rio games was revamped to emphasize technique over punch volume. Perhaps the most blatant decision in this 2016 Olympics occurred in the bantamweight bout between the gold medal favorite Michael Conlan and a relatively unknown Russian Vladimir Nikitin. Conlan was far and away clear winner — watch the fight for yourself — and publicly called out the judges and entire AIBA, the Amateur International Boxing Association, in his post-fight interview. The heavyweight gold medal match proved to be controversial as well, and dealt with yet another Russian boxer. Evgeny Tishchenko of Russia was awarded a unanimous decision over Vassiliy Levit from Kazakhstan, despite Levit winning the bout handily according to boxing announcers and the entire crowd. The AIBA responded to these allegations of corruption by removing some boxing judges and referees following the Conlan and Levit fights. All three of the judges scored the fight in favor of the Russian in the Conlan fight, yet two of the three were allowed to return to officiating. To some, the move was a farce to save face rather than address the overarching issue within the sport.
Now you may be thinking that the fact that two Russians were implicated in the two worst decisions thus far at the Summer Games is just a coincidence, but the problem of corruption runs deep in the sport of boxing and it would surprise no one if Russians were found to have bribed officials in a cash-for-gold deal. In fact, the same problem happened four years ago in London when the BBC found evidence that Azerbaijan paid the AIBA $9 Million, funneled through a Swiss bank account, and alleged that this payment was a cash-for-medals exchange. What truly takes the cake is that these allegations came to light in 2011 before the London games even occurred. The AIBA claimed that it was a “purely commercial investment.” And then this fight happens: Satoshi Shimizu of Japan knocked down his Azerbaijani opponent FIVE (5!) times in the last round, all of which should have resulted in a “standing 8 count” (where the referee counts to 8 in order to make sure the boxer is safe enough to continue boxing) and a TKO after the third time he was knocked down. The referee, however, never gave a standing 8 count and allowed the Azerbaijani boxer to continue after falling 6 times total in the bout. The Azerbaijani boxer was declared the winner over Shimizu in the bout by a 22–17 decision. The fans and announcers were incredulous. While the internal AIBA report found no wrongdoing, it is blatantly clear that either the referees and judges in the AIBA are completely incompetent, or something stinks, especially because during the fight directly following this travesty, an Iranian boxer was dubiously disqualified. The result from those fights four years ago? The AIBA reversed the Shimizu fight to declare him the winner, sent his referee home, and suspended the referee that DQ’d the Iranian boxer. Were any of the judges punished, you ask? Nope.
Well, perhaps you are thinking this is a recent phenomenon, but you only need to look to one of the most corrupt moments in Olympic history (perhaps outside of the 1972 gold medal game in basketball, but even that moment was defensible). The Roy Jones Jr. vs Park Si Hun gold medal bout was perhaps the most controversial moment in boxing history. The heavily favored Roy Jones Jr. lost to the hometown favorite Park Si Hun during the Seoul Olympics in ’88 after several dubious bouts that were judged in favor of Park. I’ll let you watch the video for yourself to determine whether or not you agree with the judges’ 3–2 decision in favor of the severely outpunched Park Si Hun. Following the incident, the three judges that favored Park were suspended, with two subsequently banned for life. However, these periodic suspensions have clearly not sufficiently deterred dubious action on the part of judges in Olympics.
Deep History of Scandal
Perhaps you think this level of corruption occurs exclusively in international amateur boxing. However, the history of corruption within professional boxing runs deep. See the trailer for the movie Hands of Stone about the Roberto Duran and Sugar Ray Leonard fights, also shrouded in controversy, where the very first words spoken are “Boxing fell in the hands of organized crime…” Lest you think that this corruption has been only dramatized in movies, you need only take a look at some major moments in the sport.
Just look at the Jake “Raging Bull” LaMotta vs Billy Fox bout back in 1947, where LaMotta took a dive for the mob. LaMotta later testified to a US Senate subcommittee that he did so in order for the mob to arrange a future title bout for him. Boxing is as much of a game of politics as it is an athletic feat; the problem is, that sport should be the measure of pure athletic competency and work ethic rather than the measure of backroom dealings.
Just look at the allegations that have swirled around both of the Muhammad Ali vs. Sonny Liston fights. Two of the biggest fights in Sonny Liston’s career are marred with allegations and controversy. Liston, with ties to the mob, dubiously called off the fight after 6 rounds in his 1964 bout and was KO’d with the infamous “phantom punch” after 104 seconds in his 1965 bout. The first incident prompted an FBI investigation and the second incident, though unsubstantiated, has cemented itself in boxing lore.
Just look at professional boxing’s most notorious figure, Don King, and one of his many scandals — The Ring magazine scandal. In 1977, King, a great boxing promoter, made a deal with ABC Sports to televise a boxing tournament. King then received kickbacks and was paid to alter the rankings of almost a dozen boxers who would enter the tournament. King even went so far as to locate some of the fights outside the jurisdiction of state boxing commissions, including a U.S. aircraft carrier anchored in the waters off Florida, the U.S. Naval Academy campus, and a prison, the Marion Correctional Institution. Because of this, no one associated with the scandal was ever charged.
Just look at the history of the IBF, the International Boxing Federation, one of boxing’s four governing bodies. The FBI found that the IBF, from only a few years after its inception in 1983, had taken bribes from 1989 until 1997. “The documents and transcripts paint a picture of pervasive corruption involving some of the biggest boxing promoters in the United States, including Bob Arum, Don King and Cedric Kushner.” (New York Times, 2000) The IBF President, Robert Lee, and three other IBF officials were charged with taking bribes, but the seven promoters and twenty-three boxers that were revealed to have been involved in the bribes were never punished.
At a time when the sport should be fighting with everything it has against the rising popularity of MMA, boxing is dead because it has not adapted to the corruption and scandals that has plagued it — from amateur level to the professional level. When Major League Baseball was plagued with threats to its integrity and popularity from revelations that its musclemen sluggers were laced with steroids, it responded with some of the harshest suspensions for doping in U.S. major four leagues. They’ve also made it painfully clear that corruption has no place in the MLB by banning for life anyone associated with any faint inclination of gambling or throwing a game (see Pete Rose and the Black Sox). When the IOC was faced with increased doping results, the organization harshened the punishments for doping (note the chart is older than the MLB rule changes). The most recent round of suspensions resulted in the disqualification of the entirety of the Russian Track and Field team for the Rio Olympics for state sponsored doping. For every scandal that has plagued major sport, there has been, at the very least, an attempt to right wrongs and maintain integrity.
I recognize that the most recent scandals — those within the past decade — surrounding the sport have largely been perpetrated by the AIBA and amateur boxing. However, this is precisely why the sport is too far gone. The Olympics is one of the only instances that boxing is shown on network television with the spotlight that it receives and most of these boxers are typically young athletes putting off going into a professional career in favor of representing their country. The AIBA should be the standard for integrity in the sport, but consistently fails, all while the professional realm flounders with the rise of UFC.
The failure of boxing, both on the professional and amateur level, to address its past problems — to adapt in order to maintain what little integrity it had — is why boxing has died, by some accounts, a long time ago.
