What does boxing need in 2011? Marketing

Change is never easy, less so in sports.  Nevertheless, boxing has gone through some major changes in the last hundred years.  First there was the move from bare-knuckle boxing, then the televising of fights, reduction of rounds, and finally, the advent of pay-per-view.  Each of these shifts in how boxing was conducted was met with criticism.  What was boxing with these newfangled padded gloves?  Only thirteen rounds?  How can you watch the fight without being in the crowd?, they complained.

Likewise, the same boxers who today we might consider legends, weren’t universally accepted as such in their own time.  The young Cassius Clay was not loved by everyone, nor was Sugar Ray Leonard, much less Mike Tyson.  They were compared to their predecessors like Joe Louis, or Archie Moore.  At the time, most said they paled in comparison.

But thanks to the advent of fights on broadcast television, in movie theaters, later on pay-per-view, they became our heroes.  It wasn´t overnight.  To imply that they were somehow gods in a Golden Age of boxing is ridiculous.  Old school writers like A.J. Liebling and Budd Schulberg remained suspicious of the fast-talking boy from Kentucky, who would later become a black nationalist.

However, simply talking about them, featuring them on Monday Night Fights made them household names.  And at the end of the day, press got the word out on the fights and the fighters.

That isn’t happening anymore.  Years later, media, and the hype we associate with it, is a different beast altogether.  Now there’s facebook, twitter, blogs.  Generally it seems like boxing promoters are still pitching fights the way they might have fifty years ago.  Here’s the press conference, the photo op, the weigh-in, and Las Vegas.  But that´s really not cutting it anymore.

Boxing’s greatest strength as a sport right now is tradition.  Movie theaters and TV tell you it’s still where are hearts are, but something is needed to capture sports fans imaginations in the 21st century.

Some say boxing no longer has talent.  It´s an endless pairing of half-trained show-boaters who are really nobodies.  The sport is sick, goes this line of thinking.  It´s doomed.  But this is nonsense.  The talent is there, but people need the talking heads to tell them why they´re good.  The problem isn´t the boxer, it´s the marketing.

You could say that no fighter right now ,with the exception of Manny Pacquiao, has name recognition.  Fascinating, ballsy boxers like Sergio Martinez, Nonito Donaire, Andre Berto, and a dozen others, are hardly known outside of pugilist circles.  And that is not where the hype needs to be because hardcore fans will watch any fight, even a bad fight.

That said, boxing had a slew of exciting fights in 2010, but the general public doesn’t even know that people with other names than Manny Pacquiao, or Shane Mosley are practicing near perfect pugilism.

This is exactly why Pacquiao is now to take on Mosley.  Mosley has a name while the other two potential contenders don’t.  Andre Berto – a brolic Haitian-American-  would have been a much more exciting fight, but because they can’t figure out how to hype him up, Berto fails by the wayside.

Boxing doesn’t lack talent, it lacks the big names and the blame there falls squarely on the shoulders of promoters like Bob Arum.  While boxers, tweet, facebook, squaredance and jig, their promoters hardly do anything more than show up in a suit. The poster alone isn’t cutting it in the 21st century.  How many boxers even have a  trailer?

Maybe a unified league could help with this, planning matches the way UFC does, offering a chance for new talent to display itself without forfeiting the quality of fights.  But we don’t even need to go to those extremes.  How about taking advantage of non-traditional media to get the word out about the next big fighter, before the whole sport becomes one big fossil dig.

Photo of Nonito Donaire courtesy of Top Rank Promotions