Certain types of promoters and too many governing bodies have long been a boil on the bum of boxing, but they are not a new thing and boxing has thrived despite them in the past.
Boxing as a sport is not on it's last legs by any means, as the grass roots is still there and the water carriers (and that in not meant in an unflattering manner) that have always made up the numbers outside the stars are still there in the same sort of numbers.
But what has changed is the stars. The big draws. The superstars. There are some genuine world class boxers spread across the divisions and a number of top tier fighters, but right now many of them are not personalities or do not have enough competition of their own level to catch the public's eye.
Nowadays a hell of a lot of the guys who are touted as being the stars and the best are really of the level that would have made up the mid to lower tier in decades gone by and it is hard to pass those guys off as the cream too often before people see through it and just tire of them.
Take the heavyweight division. Once it was THE sport to be king in. If you ruled the heavyweights then the world knew you. But a lot of that was because there was nearly always top guys in the division that could compete with one another.
Nowadays we have a division that is made up of guys that are simply not of the same calibre of the top guys even from more recent eras like the 1980s, 1990s or even the 2000s, and it shows in the ring and it also shows in the apathy expressed by the general public.
UFC for me has tapped into two things. One being that it does have a number of divisions with guys that have haigh levels of genuine, and the second being that it has characters/personalities that can be promoted/marketed in a manner that is not too far off of the WWE, and the public, especially the casual watcher, will eat that up.
If the heavyweight division right now had two or three genuine top tiers fighters and at least one of them had a big personality ( be it in a positive o negative way), then I have little doubt that we would be seeing massive numbers drawn to see them face one another and also to see them cut through the division.
People recognize genuine quality and will want to attach themselves to it as either a fan or critic.
People also recognize mediocrity and will only be fooled a limited number of times by it before numbers fall off of a cliff.
don't get it.
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