Letting the Inmates Run the Asylum
Let's step away from boxing and MMA for a second and take a look at every other major sporting league out there like the NHL, MLB, NBA and NFL and ask ourselves a few common sense questions.
Q: Do players and their agents decide which teams they are going to face during the year?
A: No, of course they don't. The leagues set out the schedule of games and decide when the games will take place.
Q: Take the NBA for example. Do players and agents decide who in particular they are going to defend during the game on any given night? More succinctly, do they decide which players they are going to avoid entirely to make sure that they can't be held responsible in case that guy goes off for a triple double?
A: Again, of course not.
I could go on and on like this, but the answers are going to be the same. I hope you see where I'm going with this. Right now, the Inmates (boxers and their managers) are running the Asylum (the sport of boxing) right into the ground with corrupt and out of date business practices and poor promotion of the sport causing it to lose its global appeal. In boxing, managers like Don King, and groups like Golden Boy promotions like to build fighters up as these larger than life characters that are bigger than boxing. They garner these grandiose fight purses by trading off of paper championships to make their own guys appear as though they are so significant that the sport would be lost without their presence. Everyone is proclaiming that their guy is "the greatest", and his fighter (e.g. Floyd Mayweather Jr.) is the reason why we watch fights in the first place. Now that may be true to an extent, but by now the public has grown tired of tuning in to see a name fight, if at most, 2 times in a year. What the hell are they supposed to do the rest of the time? Watch mediocre contests on ESPN2 on Friday nights hoping that in 10 years one of these scrappy guys will amount to anything?
The lessons that Zuffa has learned from boxing failures have been invaluable in the promotion and growth of MMA. People tune in to watch UFC cards because they want to see exciting, quality fights. While different fighters like Georges St. Pierre, Anderson Silva and, to a lesser extent, Jon Jones, are still capturing the public's attention when they are on a particular pay per view card, the UFC is consistently doing solid business on all of its events regardless of who is headlining. That's because Zuffa has turned MMA into the brand rather than focusing on one particular fighter. M-1 global has tried to take the traditional approach in their promotion of Fedor Emelianenko, but the sport has passed them by. MMA, and more specifically the UFC, is bigger than any one man. The UFC has survived the retirement of Chuck Lidell, and will survive the impending retirement of Randy Couture, as well as the loss of every other great champion in the future when they choose to hang up the gloves because the sport is what people enjoy watching. They tune in for the competition, just like they do when they watch any of the other 3 letter sporting organizations year in and year out.
Boxing used to be able to be about the man. But now "the man" just isn't enough to carry the sport anymore. Boxing's only way to save itself is to go through the process of downsizing. They must contract the 4 sanctioning bodies down into one consolidate organization and reduce the number of weight classes. Once done, the sanctioning body can then conduct and operate a tournament fight system consisting of the top 8 ranked fighters in each weight class competing over the course of 2 years to create unified, true champions. Once accomplished, the new sanctioning body can then do the right thing, which is setting up the fights that the fans want to see. No more talk of who I want to fight and don't want to fight. You fight who we tell you to fight. Sounds nice and plausible.....but it won't happen.
Like I said, the Inmates are running the Asylum and it's never going to change.
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