[quote]TheCB wrote:
[quote]flipcollar wrote:
[quote]dk44 wrote:
[quote]flipcollar wrote:
Just happened to stumble on this thread (I’m not a boxing fan), but I went ahead and read the whole thing just for kicks.
As to the thread title… I believe it’s pretty safe to say that 2015 came closer to putting the nail in the coffin of boxing as far as the mainstream sports fan is concerned, than it did reviving the sport. Is that a fair thing to say? Going into 2015, people still cared about Mayweather, and that was it. The only people I know personally who still following boxing are boxers. [/quote]
Man I couldn’t disagree more. This has been a great year for boxing and there is still a huge fight to come in November.
Canelo-Kirkland had an attendance of nearly 32k.
GGG and Lemieux, a Kazakh and a Canadian mind you, just put over 20k seats in Madison Square Garden.
Sure May-Pac was a dud of a fight, but it clearly showed that people have interest in the sport. Now with that said, the sport clearly isn’t as mainstream as it once was, but its demise has been greatly exaggerated.
Some monster fights on the horizon. GGG vs Cotto/Canelo winner. Ward-Kovalev. GGG-Ward. Pac-Kahn. Brook-Khan. Even some of the lighter classes have big potential. Lomachenko, Chocolatito, etc. No doubt Mayweather is/was the biggest name in the sport, but the void always eventually gets filled, plus I think you are looking at the sport strictly from American fans. Froch-Groves had an attendance of 80k, think about that number for a second, 10k more than the freaking Super Bowl. [/quote]
I’m only familiar with like 3 of those names. I don’t doubt the sport is retaining the hardcore following it already had. But there are no transcendent superstars in boxing anymore. Transcendent superstars are what bring in outsiders to niche sports (think Tiger Woods with golf). Boxing does not have that after Mayweather. One may pop up, but that hasn’t happened to this point.
And I’ll readily admit that I’m looking at it from an American point of view, as I am American, but your last point is ridiculous. Boxing rings are substantially smaller than a football field, so of course you can sell more tickets at a stadium… that’s not a useful metric. If you doubled, tripled, etc the size of the Superbowl stadium, you’d still fill it. And tickets would sell for substantially higher prices, because there is infinitely higher demand. People save money for years just to make their ‘dream trip’ to a Superbowl. There isn’t a person on Earth who saved money for years to see the Foch-Groves fight.[/quote]
Froch - Groves sold out in an hour. if the stadium could have held more people it would have sold out that too.
Any Klitschko fight at all in Germany sells out a 55k stadium every time. There are other similar examples.
Mayweather earned $250m for one performance. Name any other sportman on that level.
The sport is followed by tens of millions across various different countries at a hardcore/casual level.
What more exactly do you expect?
You don’t seem to have a point at all bar you don’t have much knowledge or interest in the sport.
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I can address these points.
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I don’t put much stock in whether or not any live event in general sells out. This is based on so many factors. The secondary ticket market is far more interesting. These days, every major sporting event sells out almost immediately. What happens to those tickets after the initial sale is more telling regarding demand; IE how many tickets are resold for a higher price, and what that price is. Actual viewership (meaning TV viewership) is also a more important metric as far as the true popularity of an event.
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Basically the same point as above.
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I’m not going to argue with that. I acknowledged that Mayweather was a transcendent figure in boxing, so we’re in agreement there. There’s nobody else like him in boxing. That’s the problem I intended to illustrate.
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As to what more I would expect… The title of the thread is ‘the revival of boxing’, which I interpret as renewing interesting that was once there and has since been lost, or at least moving in that direction. I feel like that’s a fair definition, and I feel as though this did not happen in 2015. I grew up as not a boxing fan per se, or a casual fan at best, and yet I had awareness of quite a few boxers, even without having seen most of them fight. Contrast that to today, where I pay infinitely more attention to sports than I did as a kid, the internet makes everyone more aware of such things, and yet I now know fewer names in the sport than when I wasn’t really paying attention 20 years ago. That’s my perspective.
One thing from another post that I totally agree with is that my ‘nail in the coffin’ comment is hyperbole. Obviously such a nail can’t truly exist, because we don’t know what’s on the horizon. So it’s fair to say this will never actually happen.