Lost amid the fanfare of sports’ return to American culture, boxing came back in early June on ESPN’s airwaves to little acclaim.
Boxing once captured the American zeitgeist in a way arguably no sport ever had before or has since. Muhammad Ali was a symbol of 1960s resistance as he staked his claim to being the greatest of all time. “Iron” Mike Tyson was a juggernaut who is still to this day a cultural icon even though his time at the peak of the sport ended quickly in the ’90s.
From Holyfield to Foreman to De La Hoya, boxing captured the public’s attention into the 2000s in a way that seems incredible now. When the sport’s last two big names, Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao, finally met in 2015, they topped 4.4 million pay-per-view buys in the United States.
Meanwhile, boxing’s re-debut after the lockdown brought in around 300,000 viewers on ESPN per show, with no pay-per-view required. The return can’t really offer good matchups, but good matchups were a rarity well before the virus hit anyway. Perhaps the problem is nobody believes anymore that they would be watching the best fighting the best.
But in February, two of the best did slug it out. Heavyweight boxing was always the sport’s calling card, and when two outlandish personalities such as Tyson Fury and Deontay Wilder are the division’s kings, you would expect major buzz. Their rematch did well in the current boxing climate, but even then, it landed around 825,000 buys.
Part of the problem could be the rise of mixed martial arts. MMA, a mix of wrestling and boxing fought in an octagon, has been steadily gaining in popularity, perhaps at the expense of boxing.
Another problem, it seems, is that American boxers are no longer the kings of the ring. With the fall of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europeans could finally pursue boxing as a profession. Arguably, the biggest star in America is Kazakhstan’s Gennady Golovkin. Of the other top stars in the sport, only Wilder is American. Fury and Anthony Joshua, now the top heavyweights, are British, and the biggest draw in the sport is Mexico’s Canelo Alvarez.
Every so often, American interest flares up again. When Andy Ruiz shocked Joshua in one of the sport’s biggest upsets, he went on the late-night circuit, and their rematch landed almost 2 million viewers. But Ruiz face-planted, and the Sweet Science became an afterthought again.
In boxing, America has no true champion. And in America, boxing has no mainstream fan base anymore.
