Boxing's decline follows newspapers' fall

In 2006, I was part of a panel at the annual Associated Press Sports Editors convention to discuss the coverage of boxing in daily newspapers.

Al Bernstein, the crackerjack analyst on Showtime, was the moderator. But other than myself, none of the other three men on that panel write about boxing full time today, less than three years later.

Ron Borges of the Boston Herald is now a general sports columnist. Though he still does an excellent freelance column at the boxing website The Sweet Science, his boxing coverage in the Herald is limited to only the most significant fights.

Tim Dahlberg of the Associated Press, long one of the finest sports writers in the world, used to be a regular at fights from Las Vegas to Louisiana. If he now covers three fights a year, though, that's a lot.

And Steve Springer of the Los Angeles Times first got yanked from the boxing beat to cover the Lakers online, and then was offered a buyout, which he accepted.

So three of the finest sports writers of their day are essentially no longer covering boxing and have not been replaced.

And those boxing diehards among us wonder why we may have seen the last of stars with the drawing power of the ilk of Oscar De La Hoya.

"It's hard to have a star when the sport is almost completely neglected by newspapers," said Michael Katz, late of the New York Times and New York Daily News and one of the finest boxing writers ever. "Most newspaper sports editors don't have a clue about boxing and don't even consider it when they're planning their coverage."

The sport has a thriving following on the Internet, where there is more information available than ever before. There is a website in which you can access the fight-by-fight record of nearly every boxer ever. There are websites that breathlessly deliver even the most mundane boxing news.

There are tremendous amounts of video of boxing available on the web and there are forums where fans can chat about it all day and all night.

The problem is, most of the fans who go to those sites are already hardcore fans.

"The websites are basically preaching to the converted," said Katz, who is semi-retired and living in Las Vegas.

There aren't, though, newspaper reporters who are spending the time to learn the fighters and who make the boxers larger-than-life figures to the readers of the paper. It was common many years ago for beat writers to stay in a fighter's camp the entire time he was in training, just as baseball's beat writers now make the annual trek to either Florida or Arizona to chronicle spring training.

Even 20 years ago, there were reporters who would spend days in a fighter's camp and would fill the papers with stories about the man and the matchup.

Now, though, boxers want no part of allowing reporters into their camps. Workouts are frequently off limits, though not many reporters seem to mind. Promoters do hold occasional conference calls, in which clichés flow and no real stories can be told, in an attempt to hype a fight, but it doesn't produce the same kind of content as when a reporter spends days with the fighter.

It can't be surprising, then, that there is a dwindling few fighters who are actually ticket sellers and/or pay-per-view attractions.

Manny Pacquiao will sell a lot of tickets no matter where he is fighting. Ricky Hatton is extraordinarily popular in the U.K. and is a big ticket seller in the U.S. if he's in a big fight.

Middleweight champion Kelly Pavlik has an extraordinarily loyal fan base in and around his hometown of Youngstown, Ohio, but a better estimate of his widespread appeal is his tepid pay-per-view sales.

Chad Dawson, the wonderfully gifted light heavyweight champion, struggled to sell seats in a tiny arena that barely held 1,000 fans for his fight with Antonio Tarver last year. And though Dawson performed exceedingly well, interest in him is so low that the rematch will be held inside a tiny concert hall at the Hard Rock in Las Vegas.

"Ray Leonard was built by network TV," said promoter Lou DiBella, who once was the boxing programmer at industry giant HBO. "Oscar De La Hoya had tremendous television coverage to help him when he broke in, plus there were boxing writers in every major market.

"Anyone who thinks these Internet sites are a sufficient substitute for newspaper coverage of boxing is dead wrong. The web sites are doing nothing other than feeding the hardcore fans. We don't get the kind of [newspaper] coverage that Ray got, or that Oscar got, to help us build the next generation of stars."

One of the smart moves that promoters have made in recent months has been to take the show on the road and to not rely upon Las Vegas casinos nearly as much.

Las Vegas, which used to land a significant percentage of the sport's major, and mid-major fights, hasn't had anything close to a major boxing match in 2009 and won't until the Paul Williams-Winky Wright bout on April 11.

Golden Boy was shrewd by taking the Juan Manuel Marquez-Juan Diaz fight to Houston on Feb. 28, where an adoring hometown crowd cheered the every move of local heroes Diaz and Rocky Juarez.

Not only were the fights outstanding, but the atmosphere in the area was such that it made for great television.

"The atmosphere makes a huge, significant difference," HBO's Kery Davis said. "If there's a guy sitting on his couch flipping through the channels and he comes across a fight where the crowd is going nuts, he's more likely to stick around and watch what's going on. If you hear 20,000 people going crazy, it's a natural instinct to put the remote down and see what the heck is going on."

Las Vegas is a mega-event town and boxing doesn't do well in the city unless it's a huge show. A fight like the welterweight title bout between Andre Berto and Luis Collazo, which almost assuredly will be among the finalists for the 2009 Fight of the Year, would have struggled to draw 2,500 fans in Las Vegas.

Even the Marquez-Diaz fight would have been fortunate to sell half as many tickets in Las Vegas as the more than 14,000 that Golden Boy sold in Houston.

The biggest events in Las Vegas are electric, and no city does a big show nearly as well. But promoters have learned the hard way that they won't get rich doing all their business with Las Vegas casinos.

Hall of Fame promoter J. Russell Peltz made his bones by putting on consistently good-drawing shows in Philadelphia in the 1970s and 1980s featuring local favorites like Willie "The Worm" Monroe, Bennie Briscoe, Bobby "Boogaloo" Watts and Frank "The Animal" Fletcher.

Peltz leveraged the hometown fans' loyalty and sold plenty of tickets and created a great in-arena atmosphere. That led to many televised fights that then increased the fighters' popularity and, ultimately, their pay.

DiBella said he tried to follow the Peltz blueprint and make a fight between New Yorkers Paulie Malignaggi and Dmitry Salita, both of whom have very large local fan bases, but had to give up when there was a lack of interest from television and funding then couldn't be obtained.

"When you have a fight that will sell out in New York City in five hours, that's a fight that should be made," DiBella said.

There is a cycle that has played out over and over.

Newspaper coverage in a market leads to fan interest. Fan interest leads to ticket purchases and ticket purchases lead to television coverage.

But newspapers are struggling to survive, their resources are diminishing and there are next-to-no editors willing to gamble their precious newsprint on whether or not readers are going to buy a paper to read a boxing story. They'll stick with the tried and true sports like baseball and football.

Promoters aren't willing to invest the kind of money that owners of the Ultimate Fighting Championship have in order to build fan interest in mixed martial arts. Dana White and casino moguls Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta bought the UFC in 2001 for $2 million, but poured their fortunes into it trying to turn it around.

In 2005, before their turnaround, they were $44 million in the hole. There are zero boxing promoters on the planet willing to make that kind of a commitment.

The UFC's commitment paid off handsomely, though. The UFC had pay-per-view cards in successive months, in November, December and January, which each exceeded 1 million buys.

Contrary to popular belief, though, boxing is hardly dying. There was a Staples Center-record crowd of more than 20,000 at the Shane Mosley-Antonio Margarito fight in January. The Marquez-Diaz fight had almost 15,000 fans in Houston.

The right fight in the right place will sell.

But the days when boxers became larger-than-life icons, like Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson and Rocky Marciano and Muhammad Ali and "Big" George Foreman and Sugar Ray Leonard and Oscar De La Hoya are gone, probably forever.

Even winning an Olympic gold medal won't help a fighter shed his anonymity, as Andre Ward could attest.

Boxing, though, will be OK, as long as promoters actually get out on the road and promote to sell tickets and not just open the doors and expect the crowds to rush in. It will do just fine if HBO and Showtime maintain the high standards they've set in early 2009 by buying outstanding matches and passing on the second-tier shows.

It wouldn't hurt, though, if some sports editor of some newspaper somewhere were to decide to spice up the coverage by assigning a few boxing stories.

Boxing has too many great stories to tell to wind up in sports briefs.