HAS BOXING become irrelevant? At first blush, the answer seems obvious: of course. Long gone are the days of the world champion as household name. Where once Muhammad Ali graced a Wheaties box and battled Superman in blockbuster comic books, the general public today is hard-pressed to name the current heavyweight champion, let alone spell his name correctly: the “w” in Wladimir Klitschko, pronounced as though it were a “v”, trips up even casual fans.
Yet when it comes to cold hard cash, boxing is anything but down for the count. On February 20th the sport’s two most famous and marketable fighters, Manny Pacquiao (pictured, at right) and Floyd Mayweather (left), announced that they had at last scheduled a bout for May 2nd, in a matchup postponed for so long many doubted it would ever materialise. Preliminary estimates put the event’s projected gross revenue at a whopping $400m—nearly as much money for a maximum of 48 minutes of action as the Dutch football league makes for an entire 300-match season, or for that matter as the entire GDP of Tonga. As Ring magazine, the self-proclaimed “Bible of Boxing”, framed it, “For one night, boxing will wake up the echoes of…fights that warranted simultaneous front-page and sports-page coverage in newspapers, ignited the passions of longtime boxing fans and sparked the intense curiosity of everyone else.”
How can competitors in a sport widely viewed as corrupt, barbaric, anachronistic and in terminal decline still earn more than any other athletes in the world? In part, this apparent paradox simply reflects the parochial worldview of most of the sports media. Perhaps because its appeal depends on its brutality, boxing has always drawn fighters from the lower strata of society. In the first half of the 20th century, those groups included “white ethnics”, such as the Irish-American Jack Dempsey and the Italian-American Rocky Marciano. But as those communities assimilated into the middle class, their young men found better ways to make a living than pugilism. As a result, in recent decades white boxers from rich countries have all but vanished: not since Ingemar Johansson, a Swede, held the crown in 1960 has the heavyweight champion been a non-Hispanic white fighter from the developed world.
To be sure, white fans are perfectly capable of maintaining interest in a sport that lacks white stars. But the last generation of compelling, marketable heavyweights, which featured Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield, hung up their gloves by the mid-2000s. Since then, boxing’s marquee weight class has been mired in the doldrums. Inside the ring, tedious point fighters have lulled audiences to sleep; outside it, the sport’s narrative has been undermined between disputes among competing sanctioning bodies over who is the true champion.
Without a charismatic heavyweight to crown as the biggest, strongest, hardest-hitting fighter in the world, the white American middle class has tuned out. However, black and particularly Hispanic audiences have remained loyal to the sport, whose lower weight classes have featured “pound-for-pound” greats that became community icons, such as Oscar De La Hoya and Julio César Chávez. Today, roughly three-fifths of boxing’s fans in the United States are African-American or Latino, double their share of the overall population.
Mainstream white sportswriters and television producers may fail to cater to the passion these groups retain for boxing. But even though the sport’s avid fans are far poorer and less educated than America at large—55% never attended college, and 60% have an annual household income below $50,000—they have proved willing to shell out astonishing sums to watch it on television. The average pay-per-view sale for a bout runs from $30-$60, and according to Bob Arum, Mr Pacquiao’s promoter, in this case those prices will probably increase to $90 for a standard feed and $100 for high-definition. Mr Arum concedes that three digits is an “extraordinarily exorbitant price” for an individual. However, he says surveys show that each pay-per-view boxing purchase is viewed by an average of seven people. “People don’t watch something like this by themselves,” he says. “They make a party of it…With the cost being split, it’s a fairly cheap night of entertainment.”
So how many $100-a-pop viewing parties can Mr Arum hope for? Some doubts remain about whether the undisputed fight of the 21st century will live up to the hype. It is certainly possible for older boxers to triumph—George Foreman won a heavyweight title at age 45—but both participants are clearly past their primes. Although Mr Mayweather remains undefeated at age 38, he has twice broken bones in his hands. Similarly, some of the shine came off the 36-year-old Mr Pacquiao after Mexico’s Juan Manuel Márquezknocked him out in 2012, with a right to the mouth that Mr Pacquiao admitted he did not see coming. It is no longer clear that they are the world’s two finest fighters, as was taken for granted five years ago.
Even in their slightly diminished states, however, the matchup should provide an unusually compelling spectacle. The combat-sports cliché that “styles make fights” remains as true as ever, and Mr Mayweather and Mr Pacquiao offer a fascinating study in contrasts. Mr Pacquiao is a relentlessly offence-minded boxer, throwing high volumes of punches at impossible velocities from the most unorthodox angles. Conversely, Mr Mayweather’s game is built on his “Philly Shell” defence: he lets his hands dangle low, and relies on dexterity, head movement and shoulder rolls to avoid damage while setting up counterpunches.
Perhaps more importantly, the two stars are even more different outside the ring. The clean-cut Mr Pacquiao is a born-again Christian family man, a member of Congress in his native Philippines and an enthusiastic belter of cheesy karaoke on late-night talk shows. Mr Mayweather, for his part, goes by the nickname “Money”, owns a hip-hip record label, flaunts his $123m checking account to journalists and recently spent two months in jail for domestic battery. “This fight is going to go way beyond the normal boxing fan,” raves Fred Sternburg, Mr Pacquiao’s publicist. “This is Super Bowl-esque in terms of the attraction and enormity of the event. Rosie Perez is talking about it on The View. It has crossed over.”
Given this build-up, the smart money is on a record audience. One online sports book has pegged the over/under on the number of pay-per-view sales at 3.15m, which would easily surpass the previous record of 2.4m set in 2007 by a match between Mr Mayweather and Mr De La Hoya. At $90-$100 a pop, that would yield around $300m all by itself. A further $100m or more could come from gate revenues—the 16,000-seat MGM Grand arena in Las Vegas will easily sell out, with tickets ranging from $1,000-$5,000—as well as sponsorships and overseas rights. The latter could be particularly valuable given Mr Pacquiao’s appeal in Asia: an old joke has it that if you want to stage a coup in the Philippines, wait until Manny is fighting in Las Vegas, because the entire cabinet will be sitting ringside.
It seems fairly safe to assume that this bout will shatter all previous records, and at least for a night return boxing to its long-lost perch near the top of the global sporting pyramid. What is far harder to predict is whether the nearly unprecedented attention it is attracting will pave the way for a broader revival of public interest in boxing, or will instead with a final bang mark the sport’s passing from mainstream consciousness for good. There is a strong case for pessimism: both Mr Pacquiao and Mr Mayweather will retire within a few years, and there are no fighters on the horizon with remotely comparable name recognition. Moreover, if Hispanic immigrants to America eventually assimilate as fully as the Irish and Italians did, boxing could lose its precious niche demographic appeal. It will take a bout for the ages, from the two greatest pugilists of their time, to counteract these trends and inspire a new generation of fans and fighters to embrace the “sweet science”.
