Today, the three big professional sports in the U.S. are baseball, basketball, and football. But it wasn't always that way. For most of the first half of the twentieth century it was baseball, boxing, and horse racing.
Because the sweet science and the sport of kings have faded from previous highs, their place in modern culture is hard to understand. But we'll get a chance to examine it next Saturday, when the Kentucky Derby and the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight will take place within hours of each other.
The Kentucky Derby is the one chance for horse racing to shine. Of course, all marginal sports get that one event where everyone pretends to pay attention and care. But with the Derby, we get the sports world going a step further and pretending they know something. Usually that something is just the fact that there hasn't been a triple crown winner in years. What's odd is the lack of grounding for the one big event: the mainstream sports media pays attention to NASCAR for the Daytona 500 then it drops into the background for the rest of the year. But there is at least a background awareness, with reports - or at least acknowledgement - of the rest of the sport. Horse racing pretty much drops off the map outside of the big three events. And if the same horse doesn't win the first two, the third only gets token mentions.
Boxing's place in current society is harder to understand. For the most part, the sport seems to be a spent force. It doesn't get much time on mainstream sports talk shows. Among the secondary, non-team sports, it has nowhere near the profile of golf, or even tennis.
Of course, there are sports that have a sort of cult following, in that they have lots of dedicated fans, but not enough mainstream appeal to get in on mass-appeal shows. I'm thinking of things like NASCAR, extreme sports, MMA, or curling in Canada. These sports get hours of programming on sports networks, but nary a mention on the news and discussion shows or your evening news. But boxing coverage is often just shoehorned around other programming to fill in. I haven't really been looking for the "boxing nation," but I don't see much evidence of it.
And yet, when a big fight occurs, it turns into a massive event. Seats for this fight are going for prices similar to the Superbowl. True, there are fewer of them, so supply and demand etc. But that still shows a tremendous desire for boxing is out there.
And this is all for a fight that isn't really a marketer's dream. It's not for the heavyweight championship of the world, it's two "best pound-for pound" boxers (the sort of thing that usually appeals to purists) and of course, they're both past their prime. And then there's the boxers themselves: one of them won elected office then did very little except campaign against rights for gays and women, and yet he's far and away the good guy.
So I don't get it. There's obviously a lot of boxing enthusiasm out there, but I don't know where it goes between big fights. Perhaps one explanation is that boxing is the most hyped sport there is. I found one article calling it one of the top three fights of all time. So this is essentially the Derek Jeter of boxing matches. And maybe that baseball reference brings this discussion full circle, explaining everything: sports that have a long and proud history have some extra aura of importance beyond what other sports can deliver. Even after they decline, we can think of the current participants as being similar to the legends, even if they don't really measure up.
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