Diminishing returns
QUICK THOUGHTS: Boxing continues to do itself a disservice on a regular basis
Welcome to Double Dutch Boxing, a boxing newsletter from Jake Lawton. In this bonus edition, reflections on a number of issues impacting the image of the sport, both now and - potentially - for the foreseeable future, along with my father’s thoughts on the whole situation.
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Shaky ground
THE LONG READ
A couple of weeks back, I spoke to my dad the day after Daniel Dubois defeated the reigning WBA ‘regular’ heavyweight champion Trevor Bryan in the back room of the Casino Miami.
Asking his opinion on the show, which I had told him to stay up late to watch live on BT Sport, I was slightly taken aback to hear that he was flabbergasted - and not in a good way.
He couldn’t believe that the commentators and presenters, along with the fighters and promoters interviewed, were pushing the idea that Dubois was in fact now some sort of legitimate world champion. “It’s nonsense”, were his exact words. “They’re acting like he’s won a world title when he’s done nothing of the sort”.
Being a wearied and cynical boxing super fan, I was initially legitimately expecting his first reaction to be that the whole Don King-promoted event was a bit hilarious. This nonsense with the belts and the bizarre nature of the show isn’t really anything new for boxing, so I guess I have just been ground down to expect it. Boxing’s chaos theory, as I’ve called it in the past.
The whole show was chaotic, a bizarre spectacle which Carl Frampton rightly labelled being like Monty Python attempting to put on a boxing card.
Possibly the last ever major - if that is even the right word - event promoted by Don King, he almost unbelievably paid over $3 million to win the purse bid to stage Bryan-Dubois. From all angles, it’s impossible to see how this card didn’t lose most of King’s investment.
Choosing a venue which had only recently been two feet under water during Florida’s hurricane season, meaning men with mops were stationed at ringside with the venue still steadily taking on water, the build up including Don King waffling nonsensically for over 90 minutes at the press conference and Dubois’ team having to order him an Uber on the night of the fight when a taxi had not been arranged.
In front of a (to put it kindly) sparsely populated crowd, Dubois demolished the completely overmatched Bryan - whose stint as a heavyweight champion has been a farce in itself - from the very first bell. With the defending champion offering very little resistance, Dubois mercifully ending things in the fourth round with a left hook which dropped and finished the hopeless Bryan.
Dubois himself stated after the fight that he was “just so happy to have got this world title - this win is what all the hard work was for”.
Perhaps he truly believed he had just won a world title. My dad was right though - Daniel Dubois is not a world champion, not in the true sense of being considered the highest achievement in the sport, not even close.
The title that ‘Dynamite’ lifted that night in front of a few hundred people in Miami was the WBA ‘regular’ heavyweight title, a title which has been hanging around the division like a bad smell for long enough. Anyone who isn’t following boxing religiously might have struggled to glean this, or the meaning of what the regular title denotes. The WBA already has a world champion, Oleksandr Usyk, who they have labelled their ‘super’ champion - to have another fighter running around stating they are also the world champion devalues the whole endeavour.
A ‘unification’ with the WBA super champion should be on the cards for Dubois next, but who knows if or when that will actually happen.
The fact that my dad, a lifelong boxing fan who bought a beaten-up old ambulance to drive to the 1960 Olympics in Rome and watch Muhammad Ali win a gold medal, someone who will still tune in any time the sport passes his TV viewing orbit, came away from watching Dubois-Bryan thinking the litany of ‘world’ title belts is ridiculous is a really bad look for the sport. He likes Daniel Dubois as a fighter, but intimating that he is now any sort of world champion is doing a huge disservice to a sport which has been attempting to disprove the science behind ‘death by a thousand cuts’ for far too long.
Don’t get me wrong, Daniel Dubois comes across as a nice bloke and - at the age of just 24 with, in Shane McGuigan, for me Britain’s best active boxing trainer in his corner - he clearly has the potential to go on to a considerable career in boxing. But the idea that he is now some sort of genuine world champion, after beating up the hopeless Trevor Bryan for a title which has no reason to exist, is just complete nonsense; and if my dad is wising up to this kind of thing, then many others will be as well.
Boxing needs new stars, and British boxing really needs fresh bankable headliners, I get that. But to pass off Dubois as a genuine heavyweight champion when he has really beaten nobody of value, in fact picking up a qualification trinket and the real WBA world champion, Oleksandr Usyk, is preparing to defend against Anthony Joshua is vacuous and entirely transparent. It does both Dubois and the wider sport a disservice.
The blame for all of this lies squarely with the World Boxing Association.
To give them a tinge of credit, there has been some movement towards resolving the rIdiculous state of the WBA’s multiple world champions in every division, although it has been purely forced on them.
These efforts from the WBA have only come after the Association of Boxing Commissions - which sanctions boxing events in the US - warned them last year that they would not sanction their future title fights if they didn’t get their house in order. The number of belts and champions (which has numbered four per weight class on some occasions) was "misleading to the public and the boxers". Given that their sanctioning fees might be at risk in their biggest market, the WBA has been forced to act in some form.
A year on from the ABC’s declaration, there are still WBA ‘super’ and ‘regular’ champions in nine boxing weight classes. Broadcasters like BT Sport jumping on the bandwagon to intimate that the title Daniel Dubois won has much real value certainly doesn’t help the situation.
It’s been at times ridiculous, and with the WBC creating their own new belts and even attempting to establish completely new weight classes with the bridgerweight division, plus none of the major governing bodies being totally transparent in their often bizarre ranking decisions, it’s still very much a messy picture to outside observers.
My dad’s next interaction with boxing on his TV was the Wasserman show which went out on Channel 5 in the UK last Friday night, with Nathan Gorman and Josh Kelly’s respective returns to the ring in the feature attractions.
He was looking forward to it, having enjoyed some of the channel’s boxing content in the past (when they worked with Hennessy Sports) and being aware of both headliners fighting on other promotions’ cards in the past. The more boxing on TV, the better, he thought, especially on terrestrial TV in the UK where the sport has had little coverage for two decades. His review wasn’t very positive here either sadly - “absolute waste of time”. If I’m honest, he’s not totally wrong.
The fights were not even close to being evenly matched and the seemingly almost non-existent crowd didn’t exactly give a mainstream audience the impression that British boxing is booming. Nathan Gorman won in a round against Tomas Salek, who doesn’t crack the top 100 heavyweight fighters in the world, and Josh Kelly won another mismatch. Based on overnight ratings, the Sauerlands have stated that 1.3 million tuned in to the show - which would be the peak rather than average viewership. If true, it just makes it more frustrating that they didn’t put on a more compelling offering.
Far from it being a good platform for boxing having shows like this on free-to-air TV, it’s actually counterproductive for growing the sport as I’m not sure how many of the non-hardcore fight fans who tuned in would be massively keen to tune in again. At a time when there are just so many other forms of entertainment available, so many other TV platforms alone to spend your time watching, boxing can’t just keep on turning out non-events like this and expect to cultivate the next generation of viewers.
Despite the fact that there are in fact more major active British promoters than we’ve seen for decades, truly anticipated fights seem to have become harder to come by. Sure, there are lots of events - but how many of them actually mean anything? How many provide something to capture the imagination? Not enough, for sure.
Looking at the worldwide scene, boxing also needs to find a way to more effectively accentuate the assets the sport currently has to the crossover audience. Take Artur Beterbiev, for example, who this past weekend steamrollered Joe Smith Jr. to unify three of the four light heavyweight world titles in less than two rounds. I was expecting ‘The Beast’ to win by stoppage, but the manner and the speed of the dissection was quite something.
A boxer arguably possessing all-time great punching power, if Beterbiev were an MMA fighter competing in the UFC with an equivalent skill set he would be a far bigger star. Hell, if Beterbiev had been fighting at a time when HBO Boxing was in its pomp, he would have been a much larger name as well. As it is, he is almost an underground myth, loved by hardcore boxing fans but summarily unknown by pretty much anyone who isn’t constantly glued to this bizarre sport.
Sure, there are potential obstacles - he is quiet and calm outside the ring, was born in Russia and he doesn’t exactly scream ‘box office’ in a something-maligned division - but as soon as any fight fan sees Beterbiev compete they will surely be hooked.
This is a man who has stopped every one of his professional opponents and his fights almost guarantee many of the things most people tune in to boxing to see. It’s the job of the promoters and broadcasters to build a narrative to get the audience to the point of buying into Beterbiev, after which the performances of the man himself should do the rest.
It also demonstrates a failure of boxing’s convoluted, disorganised system. Someone like Artur Beterbiev can be avoided for as long as possible, when the best facing the best should be ordered as standard. In boxing, we are grateful when the biggest fights are made whereas in other sports with a centralised system of governance it is simply expected. For other sports, stars are made from these high-profile, high-pressure clashes.
In a parallel universe, Artur might have been fighting in the main hall at MSG on Saturday rather than the Hulu Theatre downstairs.
(Side note: Though apparently a Beterbiev defence against mandatory challenger Anthony Yarde in the UK is already agreed for later this year, the fight that I really want to see is a showdown with the Dmitry Bivol, the current WBA 175-pound champion. As Beterbiev explained after the Smith victory on Saturday, he would also prefer the undisputed route next, so maybe we will see that. A timeless clash of potentially all-time power and supreme boxing skills, Beterbiev-Bivol might not be the most high-profile match which could be made in the sport, but it is potentially the best.)
As you’ll have no doubt seen by now, Oleksandr Usyk and Anthony Joshua’s unified heavyweight title rematch has now been confirmed for August 20th in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
The fact that this pretty much confirms that none of the big four heavyweight title belts will be defended more than once in 2022 - meaning stagnation in the division as contenders continue to wait for their chance - is one thing.
The fact that this is yet another example of the sport once again selling itself to stage a fight in an incredibly controversial regime’s country is another.
Taking the money from the highest bidder and skirting around moral issues is nothing new in boxing, of course, and I’m not naive enough to think that this is anything but a business decision. With that said, at a time when we are seeing peak news coverage of sportswashing in general and specifically golf seeming to implode as the Saudi-backed Liv Golf pays unbelievable sums to attempt to coax that game’s biggest stars to that new Saudi-backed operation, it is very poor optics for one of the biggest fights of the year to land where it has.
The fact that Joshua, one of the three most recognisable fighters in the sport, has this week stated that he “doesn’t know” what sportswashing is when he has just agreed to a multi-million dollar deal to fight in Saudi doesn’t help matters either…
“All that allegation stuff, for me, I'm not caught up in any of that stuff. I'm here to have a good time, mix with the local people, bring entertainment to Saudi.”
Running parallel with the shenanigans of the professional code, the amateur side of the sport has fires of its own to attempt to put out. This week saw the publishing of the report commissioned by the IBA (International Boxing Association, formerly the AIBA), the body which sanctions amateur boxing matches, with investigator Richard McLaren stating that “corruption abounded” in the organisation in previous events and that there was a clear pattern of financial irregularities and “unjustifiable” judging scores.
The 2016 Rio Olympics was a particular hotbed of corruption - with Joe Joyce and Michael Conlan ending up as unwanted victims after their scandalous ‘defeats’ at the event - with “complicit and compliant” referees and judges involved in numerous examples of corrupt activity. This led to an IOC-approved task force taking over to ensure that boxing was allowed to take its place at last year’s Tokyo Games.
Safeguards and processes to avoid this in future have and are being put in place, McLaren’s report also states. As things stand though, there is a possibility that boxing, which has been left off the list of events for 2028, will not be a part of the Olympics going forward - a decision which would be a disaster for the sport and almost unthinkable given the connected history of pugilism and the Games of the Olympiad. It hopefully won’t end up coming to that, but the fact that this is even a consideration for such an intrinsic part of the Olympics is shameful.
‘Boxing will be boxing’ seems to be the general consensus when people look at all of the above. This messy business still manages to consistently become its own worst enemy. As I’ve stated before, if boxing was run more efficiently it could be delivering incredible, elite fights and positive sporting stories almost every week. There is a lot of good stuff on tap for the rest of the year - whether through circumstance or design, more of the big fights are being made than has been the case for a number of years - but the underlying cracks in the system still need to, somehow, be addressed for boxing to become the sport it can be.
If there is one current news story that sums up boxing’s inherent ability to deliver terrible image management in a tragi-comic fashion, it has to be this: Jarrell ‘Big Baby’ Miller - perhaps one of the worst ever performance-enhancing drug offenders in a sport which is littered with shades of grey, who hasn’t fought since 2018 due to a litany of charges related to failed tests - is making his in-ring return this week as part of the WBA’s KO to Drugs Festival in Argentina.
If this was scripted comedy it would be classic material, but somehow it’s happening in real life, and given the sport we survey we’ve almost come to expect it.
Boxing. The weirdest, wildest, occasionally greatest but often painfully most indefensible sport around, is sometimes beyond satire.
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It's a shame your dad didn't watch the inaugural Sauerland Channel 5 show with Udophia v Bentley instead. It was a cracker and the rest of the card very fun too. And that was after the Kelly fight dematerialised.