Comments Thread For: Why Doesn't Boxing Attract More Young Fans?

[NachoMan]

The country of the United States has going soft. I mean that. Was a time when getting into a fight was a normal and natural as whistling at a pretty girl. But now if a kid gets in a fight they want to put him on a drug to knock that thought out of his head. I do not care how or why all that happened but no one has a chance to develp to the point of being involved in a fight these days. First time I wore boxing gloves was in school in relation to a fight I got into in a classroom. Try that now? The gym teacher would be fired sent to prison. It is not complicated to me. But in some area"s where they do not buy into the BS they still will knock you along side the head and some of those guys find themselves in a gym. AS far as the pretty girl I still whistle .....The writter always throws thoughts out like they are facts I do not know why T.H. does that a lot.

Um, I think you mean ***ual assault.

[Skip Bayless]

young 'men' these days are more interested in wearing pink shirts and lobbying for women rights than watching boxing. it's a sad reality

[VatoMulatto]

Boxing will always be a niche sport and every era will only have a few mainstream names. I don't really know how to attract new fans. Maybe fewer rounds but make the rounds longer. Get rid of all the annoying pointless belts. Should be ONE world champion in each division...etc.

[Oldskoolg]

There are many reasons....the article definitely hit a few, the main one being that the biggest fights are on POV or apps. Boxing needs to be 95% on free tv or espn, not cable premium, not Ppv, and not apps that complete remove it from the majority altogether. Also demographics and racial nationalism building over the last 20 years or so has hurt it. The largest demographic in the USA hasn’t felt apart of boxing because they can’t identify with black, latino, and Eastern European fighters. And unless you understand american history, psyche, social trends, and have actually lived in the USA (unlike so many brits who speak about the country without even ever having been here let alone lived here) you won’t get it. And there’s no real explaining that to you if you decide you don’t want to get it. Be ignorant though

[a.rihn]

I would love to see Thomas Hauser offer a follow-up -- how to get young kids into boxing. I have a six year old nephew. He's in tae kwon do, and he's exposed to boxing by being around me. I wonder - is that enough to make an interest stick? Or in 20 years, will he just be like "Oh my weird uncle likes boxing."

[Pigeons]

As an adult that would have watched boxing as a kid but didnt, a big part of it is access. I remember my dad brought home a tape from work of Vitali vs. Lewis in the early 2000s. I popped it in the VCR one day in middle school and was mesmerized. When my folks got home I told them I wanted them to subscribe to HBO so I could watch boxing. They laughed at me. 4 years later, I figured out streaming pre-Mayweather-DLH. I've been a hardcore fan since.

Hopefully with boxing being on FOX, ESPN, and streaming apps these days rekindles that imagination in the younger generation.

[Oldskoolg]

All good points. I ain't sure where you're from, but I think one reason why boxing is flourishing - at least relatively - in the UK is perhaps because of easier access to clubs and facilities. Also of course official support for the amateur sport makes a huge difference and we're still seeing the benefits of the push given for the London Olympics here.

Oh... and it's stigma, by the way. Stigmata are something very different. But I imagine that is a very real issue in some countries, especially the US where boxing is maybe seen as the sport of blacks and Hispanics and the majority white suburban population is hugely underrepresented. Ain't gonna pretend I got particular insight in that regard though so I could be wrong.

Leave it to the worker bee to hit on exactly the same point as I did. Bingo, largely it’s about race. Whites have taken to mma and mma is ultra popular in the subburbs I should know, I live in the burbs. Boxing is indeed seen as a sport of blacks and Latinos, that’s exactly why the Holmes vs Cooney fight was as popular as it was....”one of our own might win it”.....it’s my tommy Morrison filled stadiums. It’s why conor mcgregor is more popular than any American boxer and he isn’t even from the USA. And yes most white Americans seem to think they are “irish” (without knowing the difference between scotch Irish, being unable to name more than 1 irish city, no knowledge of the Irish language, etc etc)......so far you’re the only person willing to mention that rather than pretend it doesn’t exist. Gotta love the working class people of northwestern England to tell it like it is. Northern England= salt of the earth tough people

[Oldskoolg]

When I was young, the fights were more accessible, shown on the big free to air channels, not so much the case today.

On Saturday mornings young American boys could watch Evander Holyfield vs Dwight Muhammad Qawi on ABC Wide World of Sports......what option do they have nowadays? Premium cable? Ppv? Cost per month subscription apps the vast majority of Americans don’t have?
Bring boxing back to free tv and watch it flourish. Pbc showed that when it’s early shows in 2015-2016 were doing 2-6m viewers for fights they now out on Ppv in order to pay greedy fighters who believe they should make 10m for every fight

[Oldskoolg]

It’s a different era and you are judging it by white people.

I work in a k-8 all Latino school and all the Mexican kids watch Canelo fights. Even the little kids so culturally Latinos still expose their children to the stars.

I grew up in the 80’s and you still had to go to the shoulders or fist fight.

By the age of 10 I already had at least 20 street fights.

Add slap boxing as one of the favorite past times in the hood And you understand it wasn’t so much I was drawn to Boxing but boxing was drawn to me as a street fighter.

That was most the kids around the way. The difference between me and the other kids was that the rage I carried as a child made me stick with boxing longer than most. Problem is that same rage lead to bad habits and vices that destroyed my boxing career.

All my god kids are on boxing and my nephew who just turned 2 watches boxing and my kids will also train.

This beta society needs to die with the Corona virus already.

The problem with nationalism in boxing is who will they support and watch if Canelo is not fighting and or he loses and or retires? Either you’re a boxing fan or you’re not. People who watch Canelo just because he’s from Mexico are not any different from the white Americans who bought mcgregor-mayweather because they wanted to see the popular white Irish guy bet mayweather. This is a major problem with boxing in the USA, it’s marketed along ethnic lines. All american People watch basketball and football even though the majority of those sports are black. Most of
Your popular female tennis players recently have been black Americans, white Americans still watch.
Boxing has got to find a way to create real fans across the board rather than having one or two guys who get support just because of where they were born.
Don King created that in the USA with how he marketed JC Superstar. I saw every last one of his fights during the 80s and 90s, that’s when I saw a shift in boxing to that strategy, and it blew up after mike tyson lost and then went to jail and lost much of his popularity in doing so.

[Coachcody]

Good story. Main events starting at midnight makes no sense either.