By Gene Wang, The Washington Post
It's been more than 20 years since American boxing fans were regularly spoiled by exceptional fights between champions from the United States. The fighters were nearly unbeatable -- Sugar Ray Leonard, Marvin Hagler and Thomas Hearns, to name three, lost just five of 151 fights, apart from the bouts between them, from 1973 through 1991.
Their contests were almost always available on broadcast TV, and the battles themselves were riveting.
Such prize fights don't happen anymore, but Saturday night's bout between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Shane Mosley is as close as it gets. And when it's over, American fight fans again might have an awfully long wait for another of its kind.
Mayweather (40-0), and to a lesser degree Mosley (46-5), represents the last of the iconic U.S. fighters. But Mayweather, 32, the undefeated six-time champion in five weight classes, probably is not long for the sport. Once his career concludes, boxing may have another lengthy wait for a similar American champion of his renown.
"You've had that in boxing forever," said legendary cornerman Angelo Dundee, whose pupils included Muhammad Ali and Leonard. "You had the era of Joe Louis, the [Rocky] Marciano, the Ali, the Ray Leonard, but you ain't going to have no more of those guys. You've got to forget it because there are no duplicates in the profession. They were unique. They were different."
In the past two decades, most promising young fighters have been foreign born.
With Manny Pacquiao at the top of the list, foreign-born fighters have dominated the sport, and thus the prominent matches in recent years have included at least one participant born outside the United States. Americans, meantime, have embraced football as their contact sport of choice, and the allure of exorbitant salaries in the NFL and NBA has diminished boxing's appeal among young athletes.
"Part of what has happened is the sport has proliferated a lot more throughout the Hispanic community than it has it has in any of the other communities, so you're finding more and more fighters that come from elsewhere," said Rock Newman, who managed former world heavyweight champion Riddick Bowe.
Not since Mike Tyson has there been an American fighter who commanded equal and undivided attention from the boxing establishment and the casual fight fan. Years after his retirement, Tyson remains one of boxing's most recognized figures.
Following Tyson, Roy Jones, Bernard Hopkins, Pernell Whitaker and Oscar De La Hoya, among others, carried the mantle for American boxing. None of them quite reached the eminence of their predecessors. They also did not have the network television exposure those past champions had, and that has contributed significantly to the decline of the consummate American fighter, according to industry experts.
Major boxing now is the exclusive property of cable giants Showtime and HBO, which is broadcasting Mayweather-Mosley on pay-per-view. Only they are permitted to show highlights from those bouts, and that monopoly has severely limited boxing's ability to attract a mass audience.
"You got to remember, we had a little guru by the name of Howard Cosell. He was a genius," Dundee said of the late ABC Sports broadcaster who, along with Ali, helped boxing achieve then-unprecedented levels of popularity in the 1970s. "The fans got to know the talent before they became professional. We don't have that now, so you can't pooh-pooh what's happening. You do the best you can with what you got."
During the 1970s and '80s, when prizefighting remained enthralling thanks to American talent in the non-heavyweight divisions, every major network featured boxing programming, including ABC's hugely popular "Wide World of Sports" with Cosell.
NBC, which showcased boxing on its "Cavalcade of Sports" during the 1940s and '50s, recently dabbled in boxing on national television with "The Contender" in 2005. The short-lived program, which was hosted by Leonard, chronicled the lives of aspiring professional boxers competing against one another in a tournament-style format. It was canceled after one season.
"I'll tell you something that's so dramatically missing from boxing in the U.S., and that is it is devoid of network television," Newman said.
"All three networks consistently had programming that fascinated people, that captured interest in the growth of young fighters, so by the time they reached the stature to fight on closed-circuit television or pay-per-view, they had audiences that had been cultivated through their journeys into their living rooms on network television. . . . It's a time-tested successful model that doesn't exist anymore. You don't find that appeal without that exposure."
Some of boxing's current promoters appear to be listening. Richard Schaefer, chief executive of De La Hoya's Golden Boy Promotions, has said he plans to bring boxing to network television in the near future even though some analysts are predicting this fight, perhaps the most heavily promoted of all time, could set the record for pay-per-view buys.
"I believe this is the type of fight all fans around the world want to see," said Mosley, who has won titles in three weight classes.
Mayweather and Mosley can only hope their fight will evoke comparisons to some of the seminal bouts from decades ago, including Leonard-Hearns in 1981 at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas and Leonard-Hagler six years later at the same venue. The long-term viability of American boxing could be a casualty if it doesn't.
"Where you have quantity, quality comes. See, we haven't had quantity in the United States, the reason being we don't have the great amateur programs from when Muhammad was around, Leonard was around," Dundee said. "You had plenty of kids [involved in boxing]. College boxing was important. We don't have that no more.
"What's happening now is we've got Mayweather and Sugar Shane. That's going to create action. That's going to create activity. We'll have the next guy to fight Pacquiao, so these kind of fights are what gives you development."
Source: washingtonpost.com
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