The Business of Boxing & the Fleecing of Fight Fans for Money Runs Rampant: Part I

By Dave “Madcap” Mroczek

Boxing is not a sport, it is a business. Or at least that’s what a lot of people will tell you while they make excuses for their favorite fighter. Under that faulty logic a hospital is not a medical facility, it’s a business. A city bus is not a transportation method, it’s a business. A cinema is not a place to see a movie, it’s a business. Need I go on? The point being boxing IS a sport, and yes, it is saleable and makes money so it is also a business. The sport itself is what allows people to do business selling it.

If you bought a car, or a washing machine, or a computer or a widget from a business and it turned out to be a cheap piece of garbage, dressed up to look good but failed once called upon, most people would be upset. People would demand a refund, they would malign the company that makes the product, they would be getting on the phone, taking the product back to the store, they would demand satisfaction.

If a company offered excuses for why their product was falling apart, or was not as advertised, consumers would scoff at such nonsense and insist that they spent hard earned money on something and they have expectations for how it should perform and hold up. Why is it justifiable for boxing promoters to rip people off with a poor quality final product, when you would be up in arms if your carmaker or washing machine manufacturer did the same?

Let me tell you something every businessman, including myself, knows to be true. You can rip someone off once, or you can deal with them honorably and have a repeat customer for life. Yes, you can make a few more bucks right now by ripping someone off in the short term, but they will stop coming back and will bad mouth your business to others. If you deal honorably, then you will likely gain a customer that will keep coming back, and even gain more customers from positive referrals. It is not rocket science. It’s basic. If I were to sell you a fake Rolex watch for $10,000 does that make me a brilliant business man or a con man?

This is what happened when Floyd Mayweather, JR. and Manny Pacquiao delayed making their fight for over five years. I am not going to argue who delayed who in making this fight but we all know there were excuses and nonsense from both sides. Many fans turned away from the sport during the interim period because the HBO Vs Showtime “cold war” was already robbing people of decent matchups. When the fight finally was made the casual fans embraced it, and decided to give boxing a chance again. After all the money was collected the fight was on, what a dud! Both men were clearly past their best and it produced a boring show which, while profited massively, probably damaged boxing’s ability to gain new fans and new revenue in the future. The men were heralded as brilliant businessmen for letting the fight “cure” until it was worth over $300 million. They were able to rip us off once.

What nobody mentioned is that if they made the fight years earlier when both men were in their primes, they could have had three to five fights together for a grand total of a lot more than $300 million. They also might have actually provided a good contest which would have brought in more fans, and their future fights would have been more profitable. Instead their later fights did dismal pay per view numbers and network ratings and any fans who decided to give boxing another chance as a major sports player were almost certainly turned away for good. There’s a reason why the sport is shrinking in profitability and viewers, and it’s not because Floyd and Manny and their teams are such great business men.

Hate to break it to you, fight fans, but you’re getting ripped off. Boxing is being run like a fugazi watch seller. You are falling for it hook, line, and sinker. Years ago fans knew that when promoters said there was a problem with the networks, or the money split wasn’t right, or they wanted a few fights to work on things, everyone knew it was an excuse. They seemed fewer, and far between. Now when they make the same nonsensical claims fans seem to parrot it back like some sort of legendary business wisdom. We may as well have Charles Ponzi and Bernie Madoff running the sport, because is fast becoming a giant Ponzi scheme. They are collecting our money and getting rich, meanwhile our returns on our investment dollars are small or nonexistent. We are not getting the contests we want to see.

Years ago Vitali Klitschko rose to prominence in the heavyweight division by giving a great challenge to champion Lennox Lewis. A few years later his brother, Wladimir Klitschko also rose to the top of the ranks at heavyweight. The two refused to fight one another. Ok, fine, the guys are brothers, they don’t want to fight. That is their choice to make just don’t complain when fans fade away, TV contracts diminish, and their legacies don’t garner as much respect as other champions who faced all comers. Fans want to see the best fight the best. The two men sparred together several times, by many accounts, and even after Viali retired he was called in to Wladimir’s training camps to spar and work on certain things. But they would not fight, and boxing fans got robbed of what would have been an infinitely fascinating contest, and a defining fight of their era, because someone didn’t want to be crying in their borscht at the next family reunion.

Boxing. It is the purest sport. There is no more instinctive and guttural competition than two men engaging in a fair fist fight. It should be easy to sell. Yet attendance is down across America. Television ratings are dismal, as are pay per view numbers. Purses are a fraction of what they were in the 1990s. Casual fan interest is almost zero. Can you blame them for staying away? All we seem to get out of boxing nowadays is pathetic mismatches, idiotic catchweights, untimely injuries, positive drug tests, and most of all bogus excuses and senseless squabbling about why they can’t make the fights anyone wants to see. A century ago it was the color line robbing fans of the best matchups, now it’s the television network line, or whatever phony excuse line the promoters prefer to use that week.

In part two of this series, I look at some current situations around boxing that have fans paying for substandard product. There are still some super fights out there that are not being made.

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