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Navel Gazing and the Decline of American Boxing
By Brett Conway (June 5, 2007)

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When just a baby, who doesn’t have a cute belly-button? Whether an innie or an outie, people will admire your belly and you too will learn how cute it is. But as years pass and indulgence in plenty makes your belly button disappear in the folds of fat, it’s not so cute. It now just collects lint and dirt and other odd things, and you just don’t want to look at it anymore.

Boxing in America used to have a cute belly button, one that people could stare at for hours on end. It had boxing matches on national network television like ABC, CBS, and NBC. It had a list of champions like Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson, and Carmen Basilio. Even in the 1970s and 1980s boxing’s belly button still had a lot of eyes on it: Ali and Frazier, Leonard and Hearns all brought the eyes of the world to it. Later, a few names would cause people to glance over briefly: De La Hoya and Trinidad, Lewis and Holyfield and Tyson. But since the Mayweather-De La Hoya match from early May people are wondering whether all that abdominal fat has finally killed boxing, whether years of waste and greed and corrupt sanctioning bodies has ruined the sport that rehabilitates those kids coming out of dead ends, fighters like Rocky Graziano and Jack Dempsey and Bernard Hopkins. Writing about the Mayweather-De La Hoya match, Richard Hoffer of Sports Illustrated described it as “boxing’s last gasp.” That still remains to be seen.

To misquote from someone a lot funnier than me, boxing’s death has been grossly overstated. It is not dying; it is moving. It is not at the end of its time; it’s making time in countries like Germany, Russia, and the Philippines. Boxing has many years left in it, and for us North Americans, we will have to get used to champions not from the USA but from Asia and Eastern Europe, just as a generation ago, American folk got used to world champions that weren’t Jewish, Irish, and Italian.

The Jewish, Irish, and Italian fighters disappeared from the sport because they were able to enter the melting pot of America, to make the most of other economic opportunities. I believe that is the real reason for the decline of boxing in America, but it’s one that is largely ignored. Instead, to explain the decline of American boxing, a name has been given to its enemy. It’s called “UFC.” A recent column in Newsday was called “As UFC Rises Is Boxing down for the Count.”

I confess that two weeks ago I had never seen a UFC match. So, I set out to watch a series of UFC matches being replayed over and over again on my television. The UFC has some athletic guys who are versatile – they don’t just box; they wrestle and grapple and use submission holds. When the referee decides the other guy has been hurt or the guy who is hurt gives in, the referee immediately stops the bout. The matches are generally compelling. But to my ignorant eyes, that one thing that makes boxing so special is missing from it: the idea of will. If a guy is in a submission hold, the bodily pain overrides any notion of will and he gives in; when a guy is knocked to the canvas, he is not given a ten second opportunity to decide whether to quit or not; instead, he is jumped upon and pounded until the referee steps in. The UFC seems more of a street fight and a test of skill while boxing seems to be more of an art that tests the will.

Boxing, unlike the UFC, forces a hurt fighter to decide whether or not he can continue. What a boxer is facing is abstract: he doesn’t know what kind of damage he will receive; he doesn’t know whether he can come back and land that lucky punch. When on the canvas, he must make that courageous decision to continue on his own – with no referee to help him but with the pain in his body telling him to stop. When he gets up, his hands encased in gloves, he is unable to grab, to hold, to hang on for dear life. There is nothing solid for him but the canvas beneath his feet and faith in his will.

The obvious example to support this is Corrales-Castillo I, but that was an exceptional case. I prefer to look at the mundane ones. Let’s take welterweight Oba Carr. Unable to win a welterweight championship because of the fearsome four of Felix Trinidad, Oscar De La Hoya, Ike Quartey, and Pernell Whitaker, Oba Carr proved a willing combatant against three of those fighters. Watching him against Ike Quartey, I see a fighter whose body was unable to beat the African fighter but whose will was able to fight on to the end. That is why he is so beloved among chat-groups and boxing writers when they talk about the greatest non-titlists. He had the will even though his skills came up short. And it is these sorts of fighters that are the life-blood of boxing; the sort of fighter that is being produced less and less locally in America but more and more internationally.

Nowadays we have a lack of American will in the ring and a glut of Eastern European will. Guys like Klitschko, Valuev, Maskaev, Chagaev, and now Ibragimov have recently held heavyweight titles. Leading up to his match with Briggs, Ibragimov was quoted as saying that American heavyweights are too spoiled to be world champions, but it isn’t as simple as that. It has more to do with economics. The USA is a rich country, the richest in the world. The fact that there is a recession in the economy of USA heavyweights just means the country offers many other opportunities than getting your brains bashed in. Other countries aren’t so fortunate; so what they lack in material comforts they make up for in boxing.

Germany, since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the USSR, has had a rising population of Eastern European heavyweights. This group of heavyweights has caught on with the German people, making some of the fights not just the biggest sporting event in the nation but the biggest event period. For the week of April 9-15, the Nikolai Valuev-Ruslan Chagaev heavyweight title match was the number one television show, beating out soccer and “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” It’s no different in parts of Asia. When Manny Pacquiao fights, the rebel groups in the Philippines lay down their arms and have a ceasefire to watch Manny go to war. The Pac Man is so popular he garnered over 1/3 of the votes when he ran for political office in a recent national election.

So, yes, the navel of boxing in America isn’t as pretty as it once was. Many people who used to box are now playing basketball and football; many are going to school and getting jobs and buying houses the old fashioned way: the pay for it over 20 years and not with the purse from one-hour work.

People who bemoan the decline of boxing in the USA should celebrate the fact that their country doesn’t need it anymore and that they can still watch good matches if they turn their eyes to the countries that still need it, the countries that have those desperate people willing to get their heads punched around for the chance to win some unlikely riches. Whether we like it or not, Asia and Eastern Europe are now the true navel of boxing.