The Sports Guy Also Thinks Boxing Is Dead

You can imagine the enthusiasm with which I greeted Bill Simmons' latest column about De la Hoya/Mayweather and the death of boxing. In general, I don't have much of a beef with The Sports Guy other than the fact that he bores me and he seems like an aggressively mediocre sort for the entire sports world to find itself waiting upon every single thought that pops into his head.

His boxing column boils down to the firm grasp of the blatantly obvious that I've come to expect from him: in short, boxing used to be good, now its not. He throws in the blanket assertion that De la Hoya/Mayweather will be the last big fight, unlike his memories of the good old days when he and his buddies evidently watched a fight of this caliber every weekend (I can only imagine how The Sports Guy and his posse whooped it up for the likes of Zaragoza/Morales).

It's hard to argue with most of his assertions - boxing is indeed in decline, has been for quite some time now (was it Allen Tate or Randall Jarrell who said, "for the apocalyptically minded, it's been later than we think for about the last six hundred years"?). With Simmons and his ilk, in those rare moments when they deign to pay any attention to the sport at all, beating this dead horse again and again in the major media, it's hard for any fight fan to forget it.

But beyond a general question of "why?" (why not a piece about how Hollywood makes fatuous movies? or McDonald's food is fattening? or maybe something else about how he is a Red Sox fan and that is very very important?), I will take issue with two of his specific points. First, he says boxing is irrevocably doomed "unless someone improbably emerges as the Tiger Woods of boxing." Why is this improbable? I mean, how improbable is it that there was a Tiger Woods of golf? All sports live and die with their Tigers, their Jordans, their McGwires and Sosas, their Tysons and Gretzkys. Babe Ruth made baseball, football blew up after a single, epic game. Boxing was in decline when Ali came along, and again when Ray Leonard and Tyson and Oscar himself reinvigorated the sport. Hell, Joe Louis was something of a savior to fistiana in the 30's, ending the sorry era when the likes of Jack Sharkey and Primo Carnera held the heavyweight crown. Boxing goes as the big guys go - it was as true eighty years ago as it is today - and yes, the recent state of the heavyweight division leaves the sport in dire condition. And yet my main concern with the Simmons party line these days is that even if another Tyson comes along, they won't pay attention to him, because they've already written boxing's obituary one too many times.

My second issue with Simmons' column is a point that I alluded to earlier. He would have us believe that Oscar/Floyd is a uniquely big fight right now, but that back in the day there were big fights like this all the time. I don't know how old he is, but, well... when exactly were there big fights like this all the time? There has been exactly one fight of this magnitude in the new millennium - Tyson/Lewis (maybe the Barrera/Morales fights belong in this category, but not among the gringos). There were how many in the 90's? Let me do an unscientific tally right now - two Tyson/Holyfields, Lewis/Holyfield, Chavez/Whitaker, Chavez/De la Hoya, De la Hoya/Tito... what am I forgetting? Christ, how many were there in the 80's? Tyson/Spinks, Leonard/Hagler, Hagler/Hearns, Leonard/Hearns, Leonard/Duran, Holmes/Cooney. And look, I'm assessing these fights on his index of magnitude, not mine - the category here is fights that were so big that they crossed over from the boxing and even sports subculture into mainstream culture at large. It just doesn't happen that often.

Obviously I am a big boxing fan. I love the sport and I feel compelled to defend it against cheap shots. But I am not so far gone as to willfully ignore its glaring problems as an ongoing enterprise. Then again, columns like this one from Simmons seem to me as much borne of the pathetic fallacy of nostalgia as they are from a concern for the actual decline of the sport of boxing. We tend to have selective memories when it comes to the past - we select the good memories, decide that those memories represent how it was all the time back then, and contrast that with the omnipresent reality of the present, where the good moments, as they tend to be in real time, are fleeting. It's a human impulse, but in my mind, one to be greatly resisted.