Union City, NJ– Sit down before you read this article, boxing fan, because have I got bad news for you. Yes, Bernard Hopkins (50-5-1, 32 KOs) is still fighting. Yes, Roy Jones, Jr. (54-6, 40 KOs) is still fighting. Yes, someone with enough power to make it happen thinks it’s a good idea to have these two fight again. Terrible as that is, it would be business as usual if Golden Boy Promotions hadn’t considered this fight worthy for their potentially revolutionary movie theatre boxing experiment, broadcasting the fight live across more than 150 theaters nationwide.
PUT YOUR MONEY ON HOPKINS, IF ANYONE AT ALL
A much more formidable Jones won the first match by unanimous decision back in 1993– which, for reference, was back when your writer was five years old. It was also before most of Hopkins’ greatest victories against Felix Trinidad (42-3, 25 KOs), Oscar De La Hoya (39-6, 30 KOs), and more recently, Kelly Pavlik (36-1, 32 KOs). There is no doubt Hopkins was a late bloomer, and while he was accumulating the aforementioned successes, Jones steadily began to fade against Antonio Tarver (27-6, 19 KOs), Joe Calzaghe (46-0, 32 KOs), and… um, Danny Green (28-3, 25 KOs). While Jones has a small four-year age advantage and a much more entertaining style, he is much the worse for wear, to the point where the boxing community should be questioning his presence in the ring at all, even with a man older than he.
FEELING GUILTY NEVER AN EXCUSE FOR ENABLING
And that kind of questioning should come with a bit of restraint in the purchasing department. Few will deny that there is something morbid to watching a faded champion not know when to stop, but feeling guilty doesn’t make up for enabling the behavior. East Side Boxing’s Dave Cacciatore, for example, admits he’ll watch the fight because even in their old age, they are icons of their respective boxing styles, and all true fans appreciate watching styles make fights. He’s absolutely right when he describes the fight as “speed versus classic boxing…with speed having lost some steam and classic boxing fading to ancient”– in other words, perfectly even. And a fan like that will get a lot out of this type of fight because age will have little impact on their style since they clock in at about the same expiration date (5 years ago). This is not the average fan that is buying the fight, though.
PROMOTERS ARE OUR DEALERS
The average boxing fan who will buy this fight is one who needs his fix. You don’t need me to tell you that boxing is addictive– any fan that has been following the scene in 2010 is probably, like me, twitching from the withdrawal symptoms at this point. It’s a point every commentator has hammered home ad nauseum for the past three months: everyone is too busy accusing each other of steroids to actually fight, and in the meantime some fighters are raking in the millions with sometimes degrading side projects (like fighting giant space crabs– and no, I will never let that video clip die). Boxing is a business, and pure supply and demand will tell you that this makes it much easier for promoters to hike up the price of tickets and PPVs when they have any half-way decent fight on their hands because enthusiasts are so deprived of their favorite sport. Promoters have the fortune of being in a sport without mandatory tournaments or seasons, making massive industry blackouts like the one that they continue to drag through with blatant mismatches like Pacquiao-Clottey and Klitschko-Chambers unstoppbable from an industry standpoint.
WE HAVE THE POWER TO MAKE GOOD FIGHTS
The sad thing is we want to ignore this sort of shameless money-grubbing fights as a community, but people keep buying tickets. People keep ordering the Pay-Per-Views. Any why shouldn’t they, if they are real boxing fans? Simple answer: giving up on lackluster fights, no matter now empty the field might be, is always the right answer. Quality control in a sport is driven directly by the consumer because promoters and fighters will always do the bare minimum to make the amount of money they seek. Sometimes, as fans, we feel that we are slaves to the promoter’s will, hoping they put together a good match-up. Lately, all they’ve been coming up with is Hopkins/Jones level pairings– and this is one of the better ones. The truth is, promoters are slaves to the fans. We have the power to take food out of their mouths if they don’t hold up their end of the bargain: putting together good fights. No disrespect meant to either Jones or Hopkins, two of the greatest fighters of their time. But the time has passed, whether they realize it or not, and it’s our responsibility as fans to let them retire in dignity. That Golden Boy has chosen this fight to showcase in theaters is merely the icing on the cake. The idea is fantastic– take the fights out of the bars and into the theaters, creating an entirely new social dynamic and possibly enticing a new demographic to watch the sport– but the experiment gives the sport all the more exposure, and potential fans should not have two 40-year-olds trying not to die in the ring be their first impression of all of the sport of boxing.