If you are over thirty you heard the line above spoken often, and it always used to be attached to the top boxer. Tyson was the iconic example. Now, thanks to the deterioration of boxing and the evolution of MMA, no one with half a brain can look at a current boxing champion and seriously suggest that he could survive a single round with a current MMA champion in his class, let alone go the distance or win. The typical boxing champion, when fighting far less talented opponents, finds himself in a clinch that he is not even trained to break 30 seconds into a bout.
What the hell is a boxer going to do in a clinch against an Olympic wrestler?
Oh, that’s right, we can teach him to stick and move like Ali. Oh, but Ali was the clinch king, grabbing Frazier 74 [according to one account—I’ll check it one day.] times in Manila.
We could encourage boxers not to clinch.
That was the reasoning behind zero-clinch tolerance in the amateurs, which has resulted in a pro class that can’t break my mother’s clinch.
Let’s just say we teach a guy to box like Ray Robinson. It’s a great idea, but say goodbye to his legs. His knees will be kicked in within a minute. The hard fact is you have to be able to defend against kicks and grapple to enter MMA. Now, you will never be great unless you can also box, but the price of admission is learning how to stay on your feet once you get clinched—because clinched you will be. This is one reason why old-time boxers like Corbett and Jeffries wrestled, because they wanted to be all-around fighters, if for no other reason than to provide a solid basis for the belief of their fans that they were the best ‘all-around’ fighter in the world.
MMA might not have the best boxers, with most being amateur level at that range. But boxing is only one of four MMA ‘ranges’. If the boxer is a pro at boxing range and a zero at the other three ranges, and his opponent is a pro at wrestling and an amateur at kicking, boxing and jiu-jitsu, guess what, the amateur boxer beats the pro boxer.
The other factor is the do-or-die attitude of MMA fighters compared to the zero-risk attitude of boxers, all of which is cultivated by the incentives built into their sports. This was summed up best by a man for whom I once coached boxing, and has now switched from refereeing boxing matches to judging MMA matches, “In boxing the guy with the advantage hangs back. But these guys [MMA fighters] come to fight. They go all out.”
If your sport is losing officials to another sport at the grass roots level, it is time for a reality check, even if you are just a greedy promoter.
The appeal of boxing is still there. It is still the toughest, roughest aspect of fighting. It is the hardest part of MMA to learn. This is why so many cultures have singled out boxing as the aspect of brawling that they wished to ritualize as a dominance sport. I have coached for 7 MMA clubs now and I can tell you this, these guys pick up the grappling much faster, because they don’t get punched in the face practicing it! Many of them never become well-rounded MMA fighters because they just aren’t cut out to box.
Last, and not least, is the fact that the most revered MMA fights, the ones most likely to be voted ‘fight-of-the-night’ are the ones in which the predominant activity is boxing. People want to see boxing in the MMA cage. Right now there is a UFC Heavyweight Champion who is determined to give them just that. He is a good club-level boxer with heavy hands, and could probably crack the top five in the pros, if he just devoted himself to boxing. His name is Junior Dos Santos, and if you love boxing you should love him, because he is the guy carrying the flag, not the high dollar boxers that hide behind HBO cameras and are even afraid to fight other top boxers in their own tiny weight class. [The weight classes in MMA are twice as big and half as many as in boxing, which has insured that more of the top talent faces other top talent.]
There was once a time when boxing and MMA coexisted. In that time the MMA fighters were even better than they are today, as the sport was hundreds of years old. However, boxers were still the most popular athletes. Of all the ancient athletes only boxers [three of them] became gods. Why was that? Why were the boxers so revered?
Those boxers were revered above all because they fought the MMA fighters in the MMA arena and won as often as they lost. It was the same dynamic in bare-knuckle boxing. The most highly anticipated fights were those between smart fit boxers and big wrestling brawlers: brains versus brawn. In the old days a boxer was expected to have the ability to employ his boxing against a wrestler. That is the only way boxing will reclaim the title of the sport that is home to The ‘Baddest’ Man on the Planet.
Until that time, when that pro boxing champion cross-trains, and steps into the cage and knocks flat some MMA monster, boxing will remain on life-support; a one-sided exhibition sport, that makes a few talented fighters rich, and is otherwise little more than a tool-kit to be reached into by the open-minded MMA fighter wishing to increase his odds of success; boosting his chance of winning ‘fight-of-the-night’ and ‘KO-of-the-night’ and walking away with a lot more money than he was originally guaranteed.
Like it or not, in any pro sport, the economics drive the evolution or devolution of the athlete’s art. All boxing needs is one decent promoter to begin turning things around.
Is he out there?
Has he ever been out there?
With disgusted older fans, few new young fans, fewer fights and a dwindling number of fighters, the only thing that seems to stand between boxing and extinction is Mexican beer. Must boxing go the way of Aztec stick-fighting, or can it be resuscitated?
