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Guardian columnist winces at UFC’s rise and boxing’s decline
By Zach Arnold | November 23, 2008
Hey, Gary Shaw, I thought you said there were no ‘haters’ in boxing:
And there in the celebrity seats was Hatton, who started in kick-boxing, loving it. ‘They know how to put on a show,’ he said . Not far away was Wayne McCullough, who has lived in Las Vegas since moving from Belfast 16 years ago. He won a world boxing title – and might have got the decision against Naseem Hamed – but is better recognised among this crowd as an ‘ambassador’ for Ultimate Fighting Championship.
‘Come and see it,’ he says . ‘It’s great stuff. You’ll love it.’
Yes, I tell him, but for the love of Mike, this is like watching your mates fight outside the pub on a Saturday night. And that might be why it’s popular – which is a depressing commentary on the fading attraction of boxing, a sport that, for all its faults, is still an art.
Professional boxing needs America. If the fight game doesn’t shake off its lethargy soon, it runs the risk of being swamped by these bastard children of the fighting game. You won’t find many Jeremiahs within the boxing business tipping garbage on their own heads, though. They continue to talk a good fight. Why wouldn’t they? It’s their living. But it’s not the crazy, wonderful game it was and anyone who says it is more than likely has invested a lot of someone else’s money in it.
Topics: Boxing, Media, MMA, UFC, UK, Zach Arnold | 18 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
if i’m not mistaken mccullough actually works for the UFC UK division
I cant stand to read articles like this. Why cant these people give mma a chance? boxing is an art but mma is not? come on maybe if they would get their head out of the ground and take the time to watch one fight card then they would understand it and actually be able to make an informed opinion on what they are writing. Dont attack us because your sport is dying. Try practicing real journalism and actually research what your writing about.
You know you can’t trust what Gary Shaw says 🙂
I agree that these people are ignorant, but it is probably better for MMA that they are ignorant. Dana White should be thankful that they don’t take the time to watch the Ultimate Fighter when they could back up their assertion that it is “like watching your mates fight outside the pub on a Saturday night” with the numerous unprofessional drunken escapades that have happened on that show. And how Dana White has often turned a blind eye to such behaviour.
I will use UFC stats when I mention MMA because for all intents and purposes, UFC is MMA in the general public’s eyes.
MMA in the UK is in a similar state to what MMA was in the US three years ago. Compare the stats of boxing and MMA within the US in 2005 with the stats of MMA and boxing today and we can see the exponential growth that can be expected in the UK in the next few years.
Three years ago, it was common to see these drive-by ignorant and biased writings in US newspapers by boxing enthusiasts. These guys are afraid that their sport is dying and are lashing out at the easy targets. There’s no so much of these in the US today because they have accepted that MMA will or already have overtaken boxing in popularity. In three years, MMA in the United States may be where it is in Canada today. The Canadians really love their MMA.
Shaw is confused, it wasn’t MMA fans hating on boxing it was everyone hating on Gary Shaw. People in boxing have a lot of history of bashing MMA but honestly at this point is really seems more like their own insecurity than anything else. Boxing is fading because of the sport’s own longstanding problems.
As far as the TUF giving boxing guys anything to back up their assertion, that’s just silly. Yea TUF sucks and TUF shows all those guys in a bad light but the actual sport of MMA happens in a cage or ring not on a reality show in a rented house in Las Vegas. The boxing guys are talking about what happens inside the cage not on reality tv. I’m sure there are young boxers that occasionally make asses of themselves when they aren’t training too but that isn’t the sport that’s just young guys being young.
There really is no need for this. Boxing isn’t dying and the author doesnt need to worry about that. As for Europe, boxing is very strong over here and not in the decline at all.
Gary Shaw is the focal point of the so-called haters, not boxing. Boxing is an honourable sport by it’s practitioners…it’s promoters like Shaw who were and are boxing’s biggest problem, not all the (non-exsistant) MMA “haters.”
cyph,
is it because of that, or is it because boxing people have successful events that they can point to that make it painfully obvious that MMA isn’t completely supplanting boxing as it grows more successful?
If you’re selling french fries (only) from a pushcart and some guy rolls up with a soda cart, you might worry that his sales are going to replace yours.
Then you realize that when people buy a coke they want some fries to go with it.
The first link in my previous post is incorrect. This is the trend stats for UFC and boxing in 2005 Look how far it’s come in three years.
I have no doubt that if boxing cuts down on the number of champions and organizational belts and follow the lead of the UFC by growing its base with young fans (that is how you grow anything, be it sport or entertainment) then they would be okay. However, if they continue down this path, they will shrink. Growth requires young fans, not old established fans.
I don’t subscribe to the theory that boxing and mma as being fries and coke. Combat sports are in direct competition with each other. There will be a mixture of fans with the hard cores, but as casual fans make up the majority of any sport viewing base, they’re going to support one or the other with their limited dollars.
I should also add that the news reference volume for boxing exceeds the ones for the UFC each and every year even today. That just shows how out of touch the news media are with the general public’s changing tastes.
Fries are salty, so you need something refreshing to wash them down.
Asa makes a good point.
As a hardcore boxing fan for over three decades & a rabid MMA fan since UFC 1 in ’93, I’ve sort of seen it all. And these anti-UFC/MMA editorials from the boxing establishment are nothing new.
I have boxing magazines from the ’70s upstairs in my collectibles room that have editorials lambasting full contact karate & being too brutal for the public at large. And, while it’s quite true that full contact karate/kickboxing never really got big in this hemisphere like MMA has, I see no reason at all why both boxing & MMA can’t both thrive worldwide.
Yeah, boxing has copious amounts of problems, but many of them are the same problems that it’s had since I became a fan at 14 years old in 1976. And here we are some 32 years later & it’s still a major sport, so I’m not too worried.
I’m sure that back when pro football first got huge in the ’60s, the baseball purists were pissed, but they learned to get used to it & probably eventually became fans themselves.
The UFC conducts themselves in a bush league manner so it’s going to be difficult for them to get respect in the mainstream media. The UFC’s way of doing business is more WWE than it is like NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, Tennis, PGA, NASCAR, Formula 1, Boxing, etc.
Oh come on…bush league?
If anything the UFC conducts itself in negotiations as if it were a “team” in a league. But the problem is they have a virtual monopoly over the league/industry – which is not much dissimilar from most pro sports leagues pre-Curt Flood free agency.
Basically you took the deal you were offered or you were blackballed.
The UFC operates themselves as if they were a “team” in the league but the UFC doesn’t just put their “players” on the chopping block due to poor sporting performances. Often times they’ll even let poor performers stay around if they put on C-level kickboxing while kicking a talented fighter to the curb for losing one fight! They put WORLD CLASS top ranked fighters on the chopping block because they aren’t marketable/exciting, wear a gambling company T-shirt at a weigh-in or don’t sign video game licensing agreements. That is what makes UFC bush league compared to the major sports. They should stop pretending to be a premier competitive sports organization that aims to showcase the best fighters in the world and just admit that they are really in the entertainment business.
I mean come on, even if you just look at individual sports, do you see Tennis, PGA, NASCAR, Formula 1 pulling off this crap? Even boxing, as sleazy as it’s been made to be, doesn’t stoop this low. In boxing, you can still compete for a world championship if you are boring/unmarketable or if you don’t want to sign video game agreements. You know why? Because the guys who organize championship bouts are different from the guys who own the fighters. If MMA is going to be legit, we need a separate sanctioning body (just like in boxing, NASCAR, Formula 1, and the body that oversees Tennis). In order for there to be legitimacy in an individual sport, promoters shouldn’t be the ones giving out championship belts. That should be overseen by a sanctioning body just like in every other major individual sport.
I found a post on a boxing forum just now that I’m afraid to admit proves that the UFC is in a bush league state. As critical as I am of Zuffa, it’s difficult to have to admit when an anti-MMA boxing dude is right because I can’t stand them.
Boxing fan arguing that Brock Lesnar is truly legit as UFC champ: “brock lesnar wrestled in college for 4 years.
he was an all-american wrestler. won ncaa and big ten conference championships as a wrestler.
he’s not a veteran at mma but he’s very experience in wrestling which is a big part of mma fighting.”
Boxing snob replies: So you are saying that someone with an amateur background in boxing can take a haitus and then come back and have 3 fights wiht a record of 2-1 and beat Mayweather, Cotto or Margarito, Dawson, Klitschko, Calzaghe or any other major champion out there on their fourth try?
I gotta admit, the boxing snob owned him in that argument. Can you imagine if a heavyweight boxer was a cream of the crop amateur boxing champion then went on hiatus for some years, turned pro, amassed a 2-1 pro record and then beat, let alone knocked out, a heavyweight boxing champion? And to make things more fair for comparison sake, since Brock Lesnar is a genetic and HGH fueled freak of nature, let’s say this 3-1 heavyweight pro champ had huge reach and was massive. Even then can you still imagine a Klitschko brother or Chagaev being dethroned? That is pretty much the equivalent of what we just saw in MMA. And it does reflect badly on the UFC and our sport. Randy Couture is the man but in truth, he was an over-rated past his prime 45 year old man with a 16-9 record who had over a year of inactivity.