Ring Magazine on the Road to Sanity

[marbleheadmaui]

I could be all wrong about this, but as flawed as they are, for the most part I don't have a problem with the "alphabet titles". It gives more Pugs a chance to pick up a strap, and titles translate to money and prestige getting spread around.

I also don't like the idea of "Ring" being able to call all the shots, sorry Marb, I disagree with you on this one, and agree more with Bilbo.

Damn, I was really getting into this and ready to go another 12 rounds

That is a big point though. One champ, one weight class is an incredibly small allocation of reward for success. It means of the 10,000 or so current pro boxers 9900 will never have a chance at anything.

With those odds, I'd pick a different sport to participate in.

If professional MMA continues to grow they will experience the same problem down the line too. When there are a few thousand pro MMA fighters the UFC will lose its monopoly as most fighters will be unhappy to be fighting for nothing and new organisations will be formed and become more appealing.

Maui believes alphabets are responsible for a decline in boxing I disagree. I think they are a necessary response to an increased number of professionals in the sport. Maybe PPV has damaged boxing as the big fights are't on terrestrial tv any more. You can't be household names when you aren't being showcased in the household, and that means terrestrial free tv available to all.

Also I take issue with the idea the big fights are prevented from being made because of the alphabet titles. Do we have any examples of this? I think they are make the big fights MORE likely to happen as one guy has something to offer the other guy.

Maui is living in an imagined past and has totally lost touch with boxing reality.

We have HALF as many active fighters as we had fifty years ago. And they are divided amopng twice as many divisions. Here are some numbers. We have roughly 1500 active welters. I went through Boxrec for ten randomly chosen pages of the 45,000 welterweights they have registered across time. I found on those ten pages a little over 20% were active in 1940. That implies there were 9,000 active welters in 1940. Cut that in hald just to be conservative. That means in 1940 THREE TIMES as many fighters were batlling for a single title. I did the same exercise for 1970. That came in a little over 10%. Nor surprising as the sport has shrunk considerably. Again, cut that in half just to be conservative. Even THAT means 50% MORE fighters were battling for a single championship.

The numbers demonstrate today we have fewer fights between contenders than 30 or 50 years ago. Significantly so. I did a quickie on the heavyweights. In the last three years there have been a total of nine fights between ranked hevy contenders outside of Wlad's title fights. In 1973 (first random year picked) there were nine fights among ranked contenders excluding title fights. Then I checked another down year for the sport. 1958. That year had ten fights among ranked contenders. In other words in eras with one championship, fights between contenders were THREE TIMES as common.