MMA & WWE: Can Boxing Compete?
By Donald Stewart
Eddie Hearn.
His father has built a hugely successful empire out of snooker, management of a wide variety of sports and resurgence of darts in Europe. He did so by taking the product and making it just that – a product.
Take darts. A few years ago nobody would. It was fat men drinking beer throwing arrows at a board. The idea that it was any kind of sport was laughable. It was also dominated by British players – mainly English players – and had absolutely NO interest to anyone outside of the local English pub.
Yet there were hundreds, if not thousands of pub leagues the length and breadth of the UK. They were filled with semi decent players who could possible make a bit of a name for themselves playing a local and then wider circuit for their teams and then for themselves. There actually was a market.
Barry Hearn and his Matchroom team knew this. What was needed to happen was to take the elements of the game from the local pub, dress it up a bit, add a touch of special razzmatazz and there you have it a product – good enough for the television.
You also needed to get rid of the suits. Sport in the United Kingdom usually gets run by suits – “business people” who couldn’t run a business without a booming economy. They rely on the words tradition and the compliance of the spectators, fans and players to accept that if it has always been done that way it was always the right way to do it. It is also the “English/British” way of doing things and we don’t muck about with it – do we?
Barry Hearn did. He shocked the establishment when he took over by taking away the stuffiness, the coziness and created a whole new organization to support his ideas and give the players the opportunity of getting a decent living from the game.
Tournaments became different. Players played the game by buying beer, turning up, standing at the oche and throwing their darts. We watched on television as a deferential commentator whispered about how good this or that person was and we heard their knowledge and accepted it as wisdom.
We’ll have none of that says Hearn. First to go was the beer. Clearly these guys were never going to be accepted as “Athletes” who could run a marathon or two but in a new dawn of health consciousness this needed sorted. There were grumbles but not very loud ones.
Next players didn’t just turn up – they were introduced. Like boxers entering their arena they were given music, handlers to come through the crowd, music to accompany them and spectacle to announce they were there. He gave them nicknames to allow us to remember them – Dennis the Menace Priestley, Phil The Power Taylor and so on were introduced instead of the fat guy down the street who could maybe play a bit.
Standing at the oche they was not much you could do about that surely, I mean the game was simple and the rules were there to be obeyed. Absolutely right BUT you could change the way tournaments were played. Hearn went and looked at other sports and copied their format.
You got a World Championship that had rounds like tennis with seeds. You got a league that was called the Premier League like in football. You got players playing games in ways that were quick, decisive and interesting as well as longer games for the purists.
You also got all of this in a venue near you. The game went on tour with all the razzmatazz that was part of the big spectacles on television. People felt part of it because the atmosphere of the pub – where people played at home was brought to the big occasions.
The set up was the same, the atmosphere better because it was bigger, but just as intimate as down the local pub!
People were encouraged to make it an occasion – costumes encouraged, signs given out that you could write on and hold up to roving cameras that meant you could see you, half drunk on screen, being silly and being seen giving some daft message to some daft person at home.
The game belonged to the punters and the suits hated it.
Frank’s son Eddie is in charge of Prizefighter in the UK. The same flair and imagination that came with darts is now focused on part of the boxing scene. Boxing is in no way in the same awful shape that darts was all those years ago but there is a parallel in the way that Eddie Hearn has managed to get some pretty decent interest in his Prizefighter franchise. The next one is due soon and the buzz about it is terrific.
The heavy success of wrestling in the mid nineties is beginning to wane in the UK though the excitement of the razzmatazz means it is hardly ever off our screens. MMA is making a heavy presence felt and if it is not careful then boxing could find itself from top dog to side show.
To stop that happening – take a leaf from the fat boy’s game. Keep the razzmatazz, be creative in tournaments, annoy the suits, work hard on creating atmosphere and buzz and more importantly remember the fan who has to pay for it and give them something they deserve and not the argument about tradition being the way it has always been…