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Not a heavyweight sport
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November 16, 2001: 12:01 p.m. ET
With little-known heavyweight champ, boxing is punchless in battle for fans.
A twice-weekly column by Staff Writer Chris Isidore
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NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Saturday millions of fight fans will gather around their televisions to watch a compelling championship match between charismatic fighters.
Unfortunately for the sport of boxing, those fans will be watching NBC's broadcast of the 25-year old movie "Rocky." Far fewer fans will be watching later in the evening when a heavyweight championship bout is fought for real in Las Vegas between little-known reigning champ Hasim Rahman and the man he upset for the title a year ago, British fighter Lennox Lewis.
There was a time when a heavyweight championship match made the entire nation stop and watch. But Saturday's bout may be one of the sporting world's better kept secrets. More sports fans today probably recognize the name of the Secretary of Treasury than the name of the heavyweight champ.
"If Rahman walked down street in his gloves and boxing trunks, they'd have a problem recognizing him," said boxing historian Bert Sugar.
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Heavyweight champ Hasim Rahman, along with promoter Don King, at a press conference before Saturday's championship heavyweight bout. His opponent, Lennox Lewis, refused to pose with Rahman at the press conference. | |
The economics of the sport seem to be in better shape than the sport itself, though. Mandalay Bay casino in Las Vegas still had about a sixth of its 11,400 seats unsold as of Thursday evening, but the resort expects walk-up sales to result in a sellout and a gate of about $9 million, with tickets that range in price from $100 to $1,200. Pay-per-view through Home Box Office won't set any records, but if it hits the 400,000 homes expected, that will be enough to cover the two $10 million purses guaranteed to the fighters, along with other costs.
"It has an extremely strong, hard-core audience," said Lou DiBella, a fight promoter and former senior vice president of programming at HBO, where he oversaw its fight coverage. "It has been marginalized as a sport of cable TV. It's never been an advertiser-friendly sport because you don't know how long a bout will go, and some advertisers are hesitant due to its perception of something of a blood sport. But I don't think anyone is going to lose money on this bout."
The sport has a number of exciting fighters in the lower weight classes, but the general public's attention to the sport has usually been captured by heavyweights, from Joe Louis and Max Schmeling to Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier to Mike Tyson.
"There's a school of thought that as goes the heavyweight division, so goes boxing," said DiBella. "To be honest, we haven't had a strong heavyweight attraction for a while. The sport is a lot healthier economically when the man who has biggest title is a big attraction."
The sport gets relatively little attention from even the sports media today. A search of Nexis database of news stories shows fewer stories that mention Rahman than mention Ali, the former champ who hasn't fought in twenty years.
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Muhammad Ali
Ex-champ still gets more attention than the current champ, 20 years after his last fight. | |
"The heavyweight division is on the cusp of being called off for lack of interest," said Sugar. "A hundred years ago boxing was one of the top three sports in the country. Now it's charitably twelfth on the list of top 10 sports. Therein lies its biggest problem. People have so many things to consider in the world of sports that it takes a major fighter to capture their attention."
Nexis also shows more stories mention the word wrestling than boxing, although even a marketing executive with the World Wrestling Federation Entertainment Inc. (WWF: Research, Estimates) says that their studies show that wrestling's popularity isn't coming at the expense of boxing.
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"We don't believe we're competing directly at all," said Greg Castronuova, vice president of marketing for WWF. "The current popularity of boxing has a lot more to do with the bouts and contenders than with wrestling. We're both in the attraction business. You have to create compelling characters, compelling story lines."
Sugar, DiBella and other boxing analysts and fans believe that the sport's problems are a temporary lull, rather than a permanent decline. But if there is a fighter out there who can resuscitate interest in the sport, he's probably a teenager still fighting in Golden Gloves amateur competition.
"There's a lot of money to be made by somebody, but I don't know who that somebody would be," said Sugar. 
Click here to send mail to Chris Isidore
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