THE STATE OF THE GAME - WHERE IS IT GOING?
By CHARLES JAY, Editor/Publisher, TotalAction.com

With the recent series of events that have taken place in a relatively short period of time, much of the talk in boxing has shifted to the uncertainty of the sport’s future, and what to do about many of those ills that are plaguing the industry, whether it be declining ratings, declining image, or declining financial opportunity.

I live in Indiana - far from mid-town Manhattan and all the people in this business who consider themselves to be sharper than anyone else. Nonetheless, there is still a lot to be learned by listening to plain old ordinary Middle Americans.

For example, I’m sitting in a bar one night and I just happen to be overhearing two guys talking about a fight they had seen a couple of nights before. One guy’s talking about the stocky “Eye-talian” kid who looked good early, then went down, and the black guy who didn’t do enough to follow up and wound up losing the fight, and I realize they were talking about Joe Mesi in his bout with Monte Barrett.

Then, in the same conversation, I hear mention of the “big Russian guy” who “looked like a robot” when he knocked out the “black guy who was way out of shape”, and it wasn’t hard to ascertain that they were talking about the Vitali Klitschko-Kirk Johnson fight, which appeared on the same HBO show.

The point is, there was no particular mention of any fighter’s name; all these guys remembered was the spectacle of what they saw, and all they cared about was the degree to which they were amused or entertained.

I can guarantee you they’re not unique.

Something hit me when I heard that conversation - something that I’m sure I was well aware of, but wasn’t able to completely put my finger on or articulate quite so clearly. Essentially, it’s this - when it comes down to it, it’s not about WHO’S fighting, because one guy’s pretty much like another, to most people anyway. What it’s really about is producing enough action, enough competition, to keep people interested, at a time when there are seemingly hundreds of other choices on a TV dial, and plenty of other things to do, including staying home, in an average American city on an average weekend night.

Sure, when I say people don’t care about who’s fighting, there are some exceptions - those are the competitors who are truly special. People take delight in the idea of “discovering” something or someone who indeed is out of the ordinary. Fans undoubtedly took some interest in watching the career ascension of a Sugar Ray Leonard or an Oscar De la Hoya, fighters who were pre-sold to them through participation in the Olympics, who were aggressively sold to the public very early on in their careers, and most importantly, turned out to be the “real goods”. There are other cases like them, to varying degrees, but they are few and far between. As far as the not-so-special guys are concerned (a group which encompasses just about everyone else), the general public could really care less. For the most part, people don’t give a damn about the mechanism a promoter uses in building a fighter’s career, with possible exceptions residing in the effect fighters like Joe Mesi, Todd Foster or Paul Spadafora have had in their local markets.

What it comes down to is that rabid boxing fans will probably watch anything a promoter puts out there. But if you were a boxing promoter and you were counting on rabid fans to constitute the lion’s share of your audience you are quickly going to starve. To keep the rank-and-file fan - the one who works all week long, doesn’t follow the twists and turns of the boxing soap opera, doesn’t scour the internet looking at boxing websites, but who just wants to sit on the couch with the beverage of his choice on a Friday or Saturday night and watch some guys pounding on each other - you have to ENTERTAIN. You have to enthrall. You have to understand that the viewer has a remote control device in his hand which puts a lot of television channels at his disposal, and that if the viewer is like most people, he’s liable to use it at any time.

You have to have a sensitivity to that.

I hear people point to all the boxing on TV as evidence that the sport is healthy. But one of the reasons is that in terms of fresh programming, boxing is relatively cheap to produce when compared to other live events. Besides, with the advent of digital cable and satellite services, there’s much more of EVERYTHING on television, so making those kinds of quantitative comparisons is largely irrelevant.

I know a lot of promoters. Some of them are good people. Some of them are not. Most of them are clever. Some are not as clever as they think. But the vast majority of them have one thing in common - they are rather self-absorbed about the way they look at their business, and the industry in general. Since there are few superstars, most of the “house” fighters they control are not going to truly grab the public’s imagination under any circumstances, no matter what the promoter does or what he thinks. And so, the windfall does not involve putting on any particular event, or satisfying any particular demand, but in making a payday with a fighter when his record gets to a particular point, and many times that payday is going to occur on someone else’s card, on someone else’s dime.

Because the promoter has a certain vested interest in that fighter, and a degree of control over that fighter’s career path - control he has pro-actively sought, and covets - the ideal of the promoter’s objective and the reality of that objective come into sharp contrast with each other. The concern becomes not to entertain fans, and make matches with the fighter to accomplish that end, but in implementing a methodical approach to padding the fighter’s record, which in many cases not only does NOT entertain, but rather, evolves into an exercise in self-indulgence.

The major misconception on the part of promoters, in the process what they consider to be enhancing the value of their own “assets” (the fighters) is th
at the public is just as interested in following that fighter’s “climb to the middle”, and will be patient enough to sit around and wait until that happens.

The fact is, while the promoter cares about that kind of thing; the public does not. HE cares about their fighter’s development a lot more than WE care about it. And the sport has not experienced its greatest success with “force-feeding”.

The public wants to see a good fight - the pattern most promoters have fallen into is one which is not designed around “utility”, i.e., satisfaction of a consumer demand, but instead around a particular agenda, which means something only to them.

Without having to name anyone specifically, look at those cases where a fighter, who may have nothing in the way of a style the public has demonstrated they want to see, loses a title bout, in rather unceremonious fashion, then comes right back for ANOTHER championship fight, without having scored a meaningful win to earn himself that shot, where it could be argued that neither merit nor public demand necessarily mandated that he receive another title opportunity. In fact, I would suggest that in terms of public demand, it may be quite the contrary. So in effect, his re-appearance was forced upon the public, as if to say, “Here he is again, whether you like it or not.” Obviously, he was there because he had the right connections and the sanctioning body was willing. The motivations were not a reaction to demand but in fact a REPUDIATION of demand. And cases similar to that are only going to alienate the very fans this industry should be trying to embrace.

Is anyone in this business concerned about that?

How many promoters out there would actually acknowledge it?

Sometimes there is miscalculation between what a live audience may want and what the TV audience cares about. You have certain fighters who may be able to sell tickets in a particular area, but who otherwise offer nothing extraordinary to a wider audience. There is a very definite place for a fighter like that, and it’s LOCAL. Yet, on television, the fighter is continually matched, in main events or semi-finals, with opponents who are mediocre and/or “shot”, for the sole purpose of building him, albeit artificially, into a legitimate entity. But while that might work in Duluth, it doesn’t necessarily work in Denver, Des Moines, Detroit, Denton, or Daytona Beach. And to assume that solely because a fighter is white, the viewing public will continue to roll over for substandard matches, is an insult to that audience.

Boxing has made a habit of insulting its audience that way; of taking its wants and needs for granted, and that’s a problem.

How does it happen? Well, in this day and age, boxing has evolved into a spo
rt that is supported, on its most substantial levels, by two institutions - the television industry and the casino industry. What develops as a result is that instead of having a business model in which it must satisfy thousands of customers, and tailor its product accordingly, promoters have only two customers - the television programming executive and the casino marketing executive.

Those promoters - who in terms of function could correctly be characterized as “packagers” - have become insulated from having to deal directly with the public. You really can’t disparage them for wanting to go into a venture risk-free, but along the way a natural disconnect develops. And because many promoters are in effect acting more in the role of “manager”, their goal in dealing with a TV network may be to put on the LEAST competitive fight they can get away with, rather than aspiring to put on the BEST possible matchup for the audience.

Then, at a point where the television outlets dry up a little bit (like they have now with ESPN and Fox cutting back and/or eliminating shows), or the casino market softens, a promoter, who is used to conducting business under a specific formula, gets lost. And a sense of panic sets in.

That panic may get even worse because one potential conundrum for promoter-packagers is that casinos are generally interested in TV, and absent an abundance of available television dates, the casino market might naturally gets softer. Alternative revenue sources certainly have to be developed.

In order to survive, and for the sport to move ahead, promoters in this business are probably going to need to learn, or re-learn, the art of selling tickets. There are not enough people with experience in actually getting people to march up to the ticket window and pull cash out of pocket again and again to watch boxing shows.

Honestly - how many “major” promoters do you know of who can demonstrate a consistent, and recent, track record in terms of doing that? Clearly, as cable television is no longer going to be a reliable cash cow, any so-called “promoters summit” would have to include people who can come in and impart some of their wisdom in that area.

Granted, from time to time we see “superfights” that meet with wide response from the public at live venues and on pay-per-view. But those aren’t the fights that are happening every day, every week, every month. Those are not the events that can, in and of themselves, sustain this business. We are losing the “middle” fast, and at some point the promotional “community” needs to wake up and realize that it had better cultivate another source of income - live gate money - or else promoters are going to be faced with a serious crisis, if they haven’t encountered it already.

The future of this industry does not necessarily involve getting ESPN, or Fox, or Showtime, or any network to televise more shows, but in being able to change the business model in order to accommodate the creation of new opportunities. That means the cultivation of sponsors. It means making the product more fan-friendly. It means putting together a TV production on your own and making it pay for itself. The mindset has to edge away - at least to an extent - from a major emphasis on promotional contracts, and has to shift more toward an attitude that is more responsive to the actual audience.

When my friend Scott Wagner tells me over and over again, “The commodity in this business is not the fighter, it’s the fan”, he knows whereof he speaks.

Fighters come and go, but if you’re a promoter and your FANS are going more than coming, you’ve got trouble. If you do the right thing, you’re going to keep fans interested. If not, you’re going to lose them. It’s that simple.

Wagner, who operates Ballroom Boxing out of Glen Burnie, Md., has a keen sense of what his audience wants, which is something I became aware of before I even knew him. His is a different attitude toward the promotion of boxing than anyone I have ever met. In terms of where I feel this game is headed, at least for the “mid-level” promoter, I think he’s already there.

I am in the process of wrapping up my second book, “Operation Cleanup 2 - Unfinished Business”, and will be transitioning out of that and into a new phase, a more commercial phase, hopefully coordinated with the activities of the Total Action website. One of the things I have just recently done, toward that end, is to come aboard with Scott and the Ballroom Boxing organization in the capacity of a marketing-public relations consultant.

To me, it makes all the sense in the world.

In my opinion, Scott really has the right idea - he has a hands-on attitude toward his shows, values his live, paying customers first, knows how to integrate his revenue streams, and has, step by step, put together his own television distribution network, to make him less reliant - in fact, independent - of fee-paying network deals that could disappear overnight. As far as his
live events are concerned, he presents a model that promoters would be well advised to duplicate elsewhere, because nothing would make the foundation of boxing more solid than to have a strong ongoing club show program in every major city in America.

I’m happy to help him in any way I can.

I find that for someone like myself, who feels a concern for the immediate and long-term future of boxing, it’s completely consistent to be working on behalf of an organization that is doing things the right way. Relative to the dynamic under which the industry currently operates, Wagner’s group is truly thinking outside the box, so to speak, but at the same time going back to some values from a time long passed in boxing, values we may want to embrace again - that is, to think about the fans first, and not have a financial interest in fighters that can get in the way of the quality of the show.

It’s an approach that, for some, is well-worth considering.

Charles Jay is the Editor of TotalAction.com and a boxinginsider.com contributor. Mr Jay can be contacted at Info@totalaction.com