Picking up the pieces: the plagued boxing industry
For all its virtues, boxing is not an opportunistic sport. Of course, it’s peppered with big-time promoters and fighters who want to pounce on money-making opportunities. But the fact is, for every big fight being made today, there are two not made. These
are potential super-fights, fights fans want to see, and yet often enough they fall by the wayside into obscurity and imagination because of financial disparity.
Floyd Mayweather-Manny Pacquiao didn’t happen, and it might not ever. The increasing mood among fans is that it's finally time to let the dream die. In recent weeks there’s been some other notable examples of big fights not happening, or just barely making
it in under the wire. After months of calling each other out, and more drama than an episode of The Hills, WBA junior welterweight titleist Amir Khan finally agreed to fight his mandatory challenger Marcos Maidana. The fight wouldn’t have even happened had
it not been for Maidana calling for a purse bid.
Then you have Devon Alexander and Timothy Bradley, another junior welt-belt fight designed to determine the best in the world, coming dangerously close to being cancelled. A dispute between Bradley and his promoter Gary Shaw resulted in Shaw essentially
using the fight as collateral damage to get Bradley to sign a contract extension. This one is still floating around in the boxing matrix.
Industry insiders point to many things for the trouble with kick-starting big fights in boxing. A general unwillingness by boxing’s powers-that-be to work together for the benefit of the sport; cheapness and lack of desire to spend money in a bad economy;
fighters who ‘inflate’ themselves and want more money. The list goes on.
Lou Dibella was quick to paint a picture of the current state of things. “There are promoters working against promoters; there are managers working against some promoters, managers working only with some promoters. And you have to blame the networks, too.”
Dibella noted that boxing’s current business model is built on unfairness in the way of monopolies and favouritism in that it caters to the promotional companies with the most dough, such as Golden Boy Promotions. These guys hold the sway.
“The industry is a completely unfair playing field but what nobody wants to pay attention to is [that] we’re heading straight downhill,” DiBella exclaimed. “The majority of managers and fighters are not adjusting to the new marketplace. And it’s resulting
in a tremendous amount of disloyalty.”
Another factor that is coming into play, especially today, is that promoters are coercively selling their products to other promoters’ fighters even before they are free agents. In boxing as in basketball, interfering with an athlete when he has a contract
with a team or promoter is a legal offence. But because the boxing industry is getting more and more desperate, it makes for “bad behaviour” from the promoters.
Finally, there is the favouritism among certainly promotional companies and the broadcasting networks, or favouritism in the way of keeping big fights in-house; that is, arranging fighters amongst fighters in the same promotional stable.
Cameron Dunkin, who manages Tim Bradley among others, put the point this way: “If I’ve got Kelly Pavlik and he’s a draw, and he’s doing a $2.3 million gate in Atlantic City (N.J.), why should I be forced to fight Paul Williams, who doesn’t draw a $230 gate,
and split the money,” Dunkin asked.
“So now you take a kid like that, and you do someone in-house that is willing to fight him, that doesn’t want everything, and just loves the opportunity but makes a nice pay day and gets a shot at him but it’s in-house and it’s easy to do. I don’t blame
Top Rank. I don’t blame Golden Boy. They’re easy fights to make.”
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