Current Events > 10 years after Mayweather vs Pacquiao, nobody cares about boxing anymore?

(+) Yeah! (+)

surprised there were no watch parties for Ryan Garcia vs Rolly Romero last Saturday

The Paul Brothers attract more attention in boxing than the Champs do. =/

It's all about pro wrestling now

Theres always new up and coming champs. Ranks change so quickly its hard to keep up with all the talent.
Same with MMA.

It sucks. I love boxing, used to box, and help train at my old gym pretty regularly, but the sport has devolved into hyping gimmicks above actual quality matches and decisions have gotten noticably worse.

Boxing is amazing, but boxing is killing itself, if it hasn't already done so.

The casual audience only really cares about Inoue and Crawford (both consistently sell out stadiums).

The reason Mayweather made soo much money was because of his reputation/marketing, he always portrays himself as the "villain" that never loses so everyone watches his matches to see the eventual hero that that takes him down...only for it to never happen.

There will always be new champs come and go. It just happens much faster than it did in the past, so it does make it harder for the casual audience to keep up.

Wasn't that the blatantly rigged fight?

I remember playing cards the week after it. One of my friends who has always kept up with boxing talked about how masterful Mayweather was in that match by evading him, and the rest of us were like "Yeah, but...it was boring."

He's nearly 50 and grew up watching Tyson, and it came off as copium before he finally relented and admitted it was garbage.

Naoya Inoue vs Ramon Cardenas was last night and was a banger of a fight.

Boxing in general is nowhere near as popular as it used to be. PPVs are expensive and MMA is superior in many ways.

There aren't many American boxers anymore. Gone are the days of Tyson, Douglas, Foreman, etc.
Same why tennis isn't as popular anymore. Sampras, Agassi, Roddick, etc.

People barely cared about boxing back then. It's been on a downward slump for a long time.

I still love boxing but a few years back when HBO pulled out of Boxing After Dark/World Championship Boxing my coverage went way down. They carried soooooo many fights and showed all but the biggest pay per view fights on Saturday nights and even the huge PPV fights would be aired a week later. That really sucked when they abandoned boxing. 40+ years of regular viewing down the tubes for my main boxing.

Between HBO and then Friday night fights on ESPN for almost 20 years I was good for a long time.

Dakimakura posted...

Wasn't that the blatantly rigged fight?

They hyped the fuck for that fight and it was a huge dud ,left a sour taste in everyone's mouth for the sport plus I think it was when they started charging 100 for a ppv and it was 70-80 before

IMO boxing will never recover its popularity as long as they continue to let champs game the system by picking all their opponents so they can go like 40-0.

There's too many leagues and there's too much control over the cards. Put in a real elimination tournament with the winner getting an automatic shot at the title and I think you'll start to see boxing get popular again.

Prestoff posted...

The casual audience only really cares about Inoue and Crawford (both consistently sell out stadiums).

The reason Mayweather made soo much money was because of his reputation/marketing, he always portrays himself as the "villain" that never loses so everyone watches his matches to see the eventual hero that that takes him down...only for it to never happen.

There will always be new champs come and go. It just happens much faster than it did in the past, so it does make it harder for the casual audience to keep up.

I dont think the casuals fans even care about those two either. People who dont watch boxing can name Mayweather, Tyson, De La Hoya, or Manny but no casual I know can name either one of these two

Yeah, there's a lot of issues with the popularity of the sport currently, especially since you don't hear as often of big PPV events.

@archizzy also made a good point, in that the movie networks stopped showing boxing (HBO making news headlines for taking their weekly boxing broadcast off the air while Showtime quietly removed theirs to little outrage) and sports networks hardly showing it, especially in comparison to UFC.

I honestly think Mayweather is part of the reason why the popularity of the sport has tanked.

People have been talking about boxing dying for 20 years. Hell, sometimes I watch fighter interviews from half a century ago and they talk about boxing declining, how there are no exciting fighters anymore, etc. It goes through low periods, but the concept of two people competing with punches isn't going to die as a sport.

I doubt we'll get a golden age of heavyweights like the 70s again, though. Certainly not anytime soon.

Just watch this and remember the good times.

https://youtu.be/gaOTSMB6hLQ?si=uBRc0M7E-iYfAttl

Terrence Crawford and Benjamin Whittaker are the only two boxers I'm interested in at the moment. I've completely lost interest in MMA.

ScionTC_07 posted...

I dont think the casuals fans even care about those two either. People who dont watch boxing can name Mayweather, Tyson, De La Hoya, or Manny but no casual I know can name either one of these two

Yeah, my definition of casual was on a spectrum of being in the know of some boxing. I tried to ask 5 of my staff if they knew any of the two names I mentioned, but each of them could name Mayweather, Pacquiao, Tyson, Ali, and some of them named Foreman. Not one knew who Inoue or Crawford was.

^exactly what I expected

Well boxing has been turned into a joke sport for an easy cash out ala the Paul brothers, so there ya go.

If boxing doesn't have the carnie elements of pro wrestling like it used to have then nobody cares

You can even say the same for MMA

Look no further then UFC/Pride in the 90s/00s and boxing with the Tyson vs Paul shit

thats just sad really

I legitimately was hoping that just two badass dudes fighting each other and putting on a clinic was enough to get viewers interested

Idk this is not related to boxing but wow I load up gamefaqs for the first time in awhile and the first username I see is the ops and he still hasnt found his ghetto Asian gf

Didnt Tyson have a boxing event recently that was extremely disappointing, and strange?

Most people didn't care about boxing much before that either, Boxing has been getting less and less popular since the 2000s.

ultimate_reaver posted...

Most people didn't care about boxing much before that either, Boxing has been getting less and less popular since the 2000s.

Yeah MMA kinda wiped the floor with it as a combat sport TBH

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]


Tyson didn't fight smart though. He winded himself in the first two minutes.

Shamino posted...

Tyson didn't fight smart though. He winded himself in the first two minutes.

That's how Tyson has always been. Comes out swinging to try to end the fight in the first round. Of his 50 career wins, 24 came by way of first round KO/TKO.

Yeah, I don't get why people thought it was "fixed" in the sense that Tyson pulled his punches or wasn't trying. He's a nearly 60-year-old battered man trying to fight, and got gassed almost immediately. Paul is an average fighter, but he's also in prime form and age.

While that is true, Tyson also showed in his younger days that he could go the distance and win decisions. He was a conditioned athlete.

Looking good hitting the mitts is SO different from sparring or fighting. I had been doing 5-minute rounds on the punching bag and am typically much less fatigued than my training partners when we do partner drills in class, but when I eventually sparred for the first time in a few years after lots of gym training, I was gassed after 2 rounds of 2 minutes.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

Thank you for this perfect take. I was expecting yet another "Tyson held back from knocking out Jake Paul" opinion.

Tyson was always a guy that relied on overwhelming you early and basically beating you half to death as quickly as possible. He always struggled with technically skilled boxers that could keep their cool and distance and drag the fight out, which also lead to him getting easily frustrated if his strategy didn't result in a first or second round KO.

Prime Tyson was just such an overpowering force that he could ignore his weaknesses and proclivity to be easily frustrated by scaring the utter shit out of the vast majority of his opponents and concussing them early.

But Tyson is an old man now. Paul is not a remotely skilled fighter by any means, but he's pretty clearly strong, big, and much younger, so the fact that he won against a guy a few dozen years past his prime shouldn't have surprised anyone. Real life ain't Rocky.

I only knew about Tyson because of the ear thing, and even then only because a political parody band made fun of him about it like 20 years ago.

Boxing, wrestling, and MMA are just not things people talk about randomly at lunch or stuff like that. I don't give much of a crap about competitive sports, but I could name a few teams purely because people talk about them and I overhear some of it. They just don't do that for martial sports.

This has ALWAYS been the case. So I can't give any insight on whether boxing is "dying" or not, but it really never was a big thing outside of its own circle of fans like, say, American football or basketball or hockey was/is. If it feels like it is dying to a casual, then that may merely be because there isn't some big crime or scandal like tearing someone's ear off in the sport lately (and given the current state of the world and the USA in particular, a big boxer scandal or crime would just be washed away by the firehose of insanity anyway).

I agree with anyone saying young Tyson was primarily an early finisher, but leaning too far into that makes it seem like he was Kimbo Slice, who was basically helpless after several rounds from having no gas tank. Tyson went the distance several times or scored late fight knockouts and showed that he could still be effective pacing himself in later rounds, but certainly his big advantage was lessened the longer the fight went on.

Sephiroth_C_Ryu posted...

I only knew about Tyson because of the ear thing, and even then only because a political parody band made fun of him about it like 20 years ago.

Do you know much about Muhammad Ali? Curious what that answer would be from a non-fan in 2025 when he was once one of the most famous people in the world.

Pow_Pow_Punishment posted...

Do you know much about Muhammad Ali? Curious what that answer would be from a non-fan in 2025 when he was once one of the most famous people in the world.

I heard the name before but never knew it was a boxer.

Sephiroth_C_Ryu posted...

I heard the name before but never knew it was a boxer.

That's amazing to me lol (not in a belittling way). Don't answer if you don't want to but how old are you?

I've thought before how there will be a generation who isn't familiar with Arnold Schwarzenegger, if that time hasn't already come.

Again, people just don't talk about boxers much, and apparently when they do mention it, they usually don't say "oh, btw, this guy is a boxer."

Pow_Pow_Punishment posted...

That's amazing to me

Agreed

I am not even a huge boxing fan, and know The Greatest heck I even know their original name before they changed it.

An interesting view on how boxing is in decline and there are no good heavyweights anymore.

The kicker is that this was in 1950, or the late 1940s when Jack Dempsey was writing this before publication. Just goes to show this problem has been around in some form or another for a long time.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/3/3d883310.png

Looks like Pacquiao is coming out of retirement for a title shot against Mario Barrios.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

Those training videos of Tyson's vs Paul's were always funny. You could tell Tyson didn't have the fight in him from all of those videos just based on the fact that his punches were all incredibly short. Yeah they were fast and he was throwing them out like lightning, but if you actually paid attention you'd notice he was never utilizing his full range of motion. He was telegraphing his flaws and his age months before the fight even took place, yet people were too focused on Tyson the legend and weren't looking at Tyson the man.

Sure Jake Paul didn't look as impressive as Tyson in his videos, but you could actually see he could extend his arms all the way out. His punches actually had power and range and Tyson's never did. Then once the fight actually happened both fighter's training faced reality and the dude that obviously didn't have the energy to fully extend his arms lost the fight and people acted surprised by it.

The only reason I remember Mayweather vs. Pacquiao is the amazing segment on Kieth Olbermann's show afterwards, which has been aggressively scrubbed from YouTube and I could only find a link to on the fucking Touhou subreddit of all places. Believe it or not, there's actually a connection there.

https://files.catbox.moe/75x57t.mp4

St0rmFury posted...

Looks like Pacquiao is coming out of retirement for a title shot against Mario Barrios.

how many of yall watching the fight?