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Friday, July 19 Max: Forrest-Mosley not paid like superfight By Max Kellerman Special to ESPN.com |
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A little over two decades ago the sporting world held its breath awaiting a superfight to determine the welterweight champion. The match pitted a boxer named Sugar against a lanky, powerpunching champion. Sugar had one professional loss at the time, his opponent was undefeated. The combined purses of the two combatants was in the neighborhood of $20 million. That is $20 million in 1981. The highest paid baseball player in 1981 was Dave Winfield. He made $2 million a year. This upcoming Saturday night the boxing world awaits a superfight to determine the welterweight champion. The match pits a boxer named Sugar against a lanky, powerpunching champion. Sugar has one professional loss, his opponent is undefeated. The combined purses of the two combatants is under $10 million. Less than half what the two welterweights from 20 years ago fought for. Today the highest paid player in baseball is Alex Rodriguez. He makes $22 million a year. Eleven times what Winfield made. Two observations: 1) The players union in baseball is strong, and 2) even most hard-core sports fans no longer care about boxing. Sugar Ray Leonard went on to defeat Thomas Hearns to become the true welterweight champion of the world. This upcoming Saturday night Sugar Shane Mosley will take on Vernon Forrest in an attempt to do the same. Their fight is a rematch of a thrilling affair in which Forrest decked his amateur rival twice en route to winning a brutal 12-round decision. Even 20 years ago boxing's popularity had already been waning for decades. But while casual sports fan might not have cared about who the welterweight champion of the world was, hard-core sports fan did. Today they do not. I co-hosted Pardon the Interruption this last week. PTI is one of the smartest sports talk shows in the history of television. Its producers are creative people out ahead of the curve -- they understand sports and they understand entertainment. They "get it." It was an extraordinarily slow week in sports, a point that was even broached on-air. Each morning, in the pre-show meeting there was a hunt for compelling sport-related topics to discuss on the program. Yet it was not until the last show of the week that the producers finally allowed Forrest-Mosley to make air. I was told that I would get to talk the fight up as much as I wanted -- but that I had 60 seconds to do it. If you walk down a street and see a man putting a golf ball on one corner, two guys shooting hoops on another corner, a couple of guys playing stickball on a third corner and two guys in a fistfight on the fourth corner, where do you expect to see the crowd? There are televised celebrity golf tournaments, basketball and softball games. Nobody cares. Celebrity boxing does monster ratings. People naturally like boxing more than any other sport. Boxing is intrinsically the most compelling sport there is. So why does it take three days of cajolling intelligent, even brilliant television/sports people to get them to allow boxing to be the topic of conversation for even one minute in the middle of the slowest sports week of the year? How often have you heard, or even said that "they" should abolish the designated hitter in baseball? That "they" should get rid of instant replay in football, or go to it in basketball? That "they" should not be so uptight about noise in golf? We refer to "them" -- Major League Baseball, the National Football and Basketball Leagues, the PGA Tour. You know, "they" should only have one champion per division in boxing. The problem is that there is no "they." There is no strong centralized authority in boxing. As a result we have thousands of factions all vying for their own short term interests. There is no commissioner looking out for the long term health of the sport. There is no union representing the fighters collective interests. There is no gameplan, and no apparatus to implement one even if it existed. Government intervention can help rid boxing of its corrupt element, but it will take a serious financial commitment by a large corporation with deep pockets and long arms to return boxing to its rightful and natural position atop the American sporting landscape. The Disney corporation owns ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNNEWS, ABC and even has a pay-per-view arm. There is no company better positioned to make a success of a boxing league than my employer. Several years ago the NHL signed a five-year $600 million deal with ESPN. That is $120 million a year. The NHL averages about a .25 rating. Friday Night Fights generally more than triples those NHL ratings and does so with a tiny fraction of the money. Imagine a boxing league with a $120 million a year television contract? I'll bet Vernon Forrest and Sugar Shane Mosley get more than 60 seconds of air-time then. By the way, my pick is Forrest on points in a great fight.
Max Kellerman is a studio analyst for ESPN2's Friday Night Fights.
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