Why can't some fighters sell tickets?
Once upon a time, Don King accused Evander Holyfield of not being able to draw flies to a garbage dump. That was a bit of an exaggeration of course. But King was right on the money in characterizing something that's affected boxing since day one, and remains one of the sport’s biggest mysteries: why do some fighters attract legions of fans to a fight, while others don’t?
Many fans satisfy their appetite for the sport by watching live events on HBO or Showtime or ESPN, and therefore aren’t able to notice that their favourite fighters are often competing in largely empty show rooms with dismal casinos just outside. And this is happening not just to the journeyman or the old-timer. It’s happening to the world champion too.
Case and point: Paul Williams, a guy who vacated his WBC welterweight title to move up to junior middleweight, just because he couldn’t get any meaningful fights in the former division. Williams is often referred to as the “most avoided fighter,” simply because he can’t seem to draw the fans or the competition. And this is a guy who’s currently rated seventh pound-for-pound in the planet according to Ring Magazine.
Faring not much better is Chad Dawson, currently the world’s number one light heavyweight, and a host of others. So the question is: what affects fighters’ capacity to be sold?
A lot of it has to do with style. Mike Criscio, who manages Chad Dawson and Alfred Angulo, recently said: “People want to see knockouts, beat-’em-down boxers, like my guy Alfredo Angulo. Alfredo can sell ten times as many tickets as Chad can because he goes out there and tries to take somebody’s head off, whereas Chad is more of a boxer than a big puncher.”
True—just think of guys like Mike Tyson, and the correlation holds. Most people who watch boxing aren’t hoping to appreciate the “sweet science” or the art of the sport. They’re looking for vicious knock-outs, the stuff of guts and glory that gets the heart going. And the truth is, on the question of sales, there’s simply no competition between a boxer-puncher and a slugger. The slugger will always sell more tickets.
The interesting thing here is that you can hypothetically get a guy in the ring that is in all technical respects a disgrace to the sport, and he can still be a “good fighter,” if by that you mean, someone who can sell tickets.
There have been many of these types through the years, and even some of the “formidable” competition of the divisions qualify (guys like Ricardo Mayorga, who are well-known to be horrible boxers, but still sell).
The best example has to be Eric Esch, commonly known to the boxing world as “Butterbean.” Butterbean became the king of four round fights, chiefly because he couldn’t last longer than that if you paid him. Yet Butterbean managed to inspire a cult-like status in the sport, and due to his boxing beginnings, has gone on to meet success in mixed martial arts and other sporting endeavours.
As important as style is, it’s not everything when it comes to boxer marketability. It’s also a question of method, of how a particular fighter is marketed. This includes aspects such as promotion, and also how a fighter handles himself out of the ring.
Fans like mouthy guys who trash talk. Fans like drama. Whereas in another age fans liked the quiet humbleness of a guy like Joe Louis, who represented the working class and ‘got the job done’ by winning fights, the post-reality TV world has no patience for that anymore. That might be a sad truth, but make no mistake, it is true.
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