How the Business of Boxing is Sinking Maravilla

Photos by Ed Diller / DiBella Entertainment

Sergio Martinez is good. No, Sergio Martinez is really, really good. Screw it, he’s great, maybe the best middleweight since Bernard Hopkins cleaned out the division 10 years ago.  The man known as “Maravilla” possesses the rare combination of speed, technique, and power punching that would have made him a star in 1972 when mainstream media coverage was plentiful for the worlds best pugilists. Sadly, this is 2011, an era in which the best boxers often dwell in relative obscurity while the corpses of Miguel Cotto and Antonio Margarito set attendance records for a rematch that will be entertaining but have far less an impact on the divisional landscape than their first clash. Sadly, the business of boxing in the United States is broken and the crew of promoters that run the show are  mostly a group of men whom regularly exhibit bizarre, self-serving behavior that denies fans quality match ups and depresses the overall popularity of the sport.

Boxing’s problems in the United States are not endemic to the promoters, if you ask my opinion, boxing’s biggest problem was the onset of the million dollar athlete in the 1980′s. For years, boxing was seen as the sport in which a star athlete could make the largest buck but when the other major sports began catching up in salary rate, fewer and fewer teens were willing to get their head pounded in for a living. The moral of the story? Boxing has deeper issues than bad promoters but this crew has done more than their fair share of sinking our beloved sport.

I was a child raised during the last boxing boom of the 1990′s when big cards were staples of popular culture and the smaller cities regularly scheduled boxing cards that attracted thousands of people for fights that were seen as “B” level. Today, our sport is plagued by half-empty casino halls, pompous managers and fighters who can’t sell water to a Sudanese refugee, and the hope that Floyd Mayweather will decide to fight Manny Pacquiao. Boxing is not dead but it’s certainly not lively.

Which in turn, brings us back to Sergio Martinez. A perfect boxing specimen who is both dominating and thrilling to watch, a rare combination in today’s landscape of ultra safe fighters who are high on “skill” but low on entertainment. Martinez soundly bucks the trend of boring, safe fighters and yet for all these efforts will find himself in a front of 3,000 people in an arena that seats 18,000, fighting a second rate fighter by the name of Darren Barker(23-0 14 KO’s) who earned the honor of fighting for the Middleweight championship not by beating the best but with the 21st century skill of being talented at Twitter. That whirling sound is Sugar Ray Robinson rolling around in his grave.

It’s no surprise that the fight is a financial bust.  Boxing is a “What have you done for me lately?” type of business and his thrilling knockout of Paul Williams was nearly a year ago, far too long for many sports fans to remember in the age of Twitter, Smart Phones, and every other devise that turns out attention span into mush.  Darren Barker does little to stimulate the mainstream fan and thus Martinez will use what little credibility he has among the casual fans to sell a fight that no one but the hardcore fan base want to see. A bout with Miguel Cotto would certainly sell tickets and get fans excited but that would make sense for the sport and not for Bob Arum’s pocketbook, you see Martinez is promoted by Lou Dibella and that means that the ticket sellers of the division(Cotto, Margarito) are off limits to anyone but those promoted under the Top Rank banner. So instead, we’re left with a second rate fight and Bob Arum and Lou Dibella have taken to the internet to bash each others promotional talents rather than collaborating to make an exciting fight that advances the sport of boxing and has the possibility of transforming the casual fan into a hardcore fan that will plunk down 50 bucks to watch a PPV not involving Floyd Mayweather or Manny Pacquiao.

Is that such a crazy idea? No, it’s a long-term plan to ensure that the best fights are made and thus create a new generation of fans to carry the sport beyond the current crowd. It’s a business model that has made the UFC into a promotional force. Alas, that would make sense and like the investment banks that created the US’s economic collapse, the sport of boxing has become obsessed with short-term profits at the expense of the long term vision of the sport. It’s a model that is killing boxing and wasting the talents of Sergio Martinez. In a nutshell, that’s boxing in 2011.