[Other Sport] Is Anthony Joshua going down to the fat man?

Seasider78 said:

Sad to see boxing become less about the fights people want to see and more and more about the promoters and the pockets of TV companies

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Half Time Pies said:

Always been the same to some extent though hasn't it? Certainly since the likes of Don King took control of the sport, I remember for example the Bowe vs Lewis thing rumbling on for years and they of course never fought.

We often harp back to the British hay day of fighters like Ben, Eubank and Watson fighting each other but of course the reality was that the best in the world were not fighting the best back then as they never faced the likes of Roy Jones, Bernard Hopkins and James Toney. Various versions of the belts were kept exclusively either in the UK or the US by the promoters involved and none of the promoters wanted to take the risk of seeing a belt cross the atlantic so the fights were never made.

I think the difference was that the fights were shown on terrestrial TV so the boxers were much more well known and household names, domestic dust-ups were therefore much more appealing to the general public. In many respects pay-per-view has killed boxing, its increased the revenue for the best boxers and their promoters but reduced the overall popularity of the sport.

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Seasider78 said:

Good post and true it has been on a downward trend and huge pay per view TV deals added to the complexity of the various organisations makes seeing the fights we want to see a much tougher ask. Promoters are in many ways like football chairman the better ones are those you don’t know who they are!!

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big nuts said:

I’d also add into the mix the regularity of bouts that top level fighters have nowadays versus 50 years ago.

Today most PPV fighters, fight a maximum of 2 contests per year. In contrast previous era’s would sometimes fight a couple of times a month. Law of averages dictates that big fights naturally occur, although the lack of politics certainly played its part.

The Joshua/Fury/Wilder triangle is a case in point. Promoters felt they could milk one more fight against ‘weak’ opposition to further build the fights. It’s spectacularly backfired in this instance as any fight with Joshua now is significantly devalued.

Hopefully a reminder to promoters that big fights don’t hold around forever and striking when the irons hot is often the most profitable way.

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blue-shifted said:

Question. Why is the quality of debate and level of understanding about boxing about 4 times higher than it is about football ...... on a football forum?

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