Categories: Sports

I was watching Spike TV the other day when I saw the ad for OLN Fight Night. I had seen dozens of times, but this particular time made me think about boxing, and what has happened to the once proud sport. From that random thought, this post was born. Boxing has taken a blow over the years, and has greatly declined in popularity. You can tell because those old drunks at bars have stopped talking about the fights. I used to watch the fights on HBO every chance I got, basking in the glory of men relentlessly beating the crap out of each other. Now I don’t even know who the Heavyweight Champion of the World is, and I bet you don’t either. Boxing seems to have lost it’s glory somewhere between Ali and Tyson. What happened? I blame Mike Tyson. It’s not like me to simply assign to blame to any one person or thing, and you probably expected a more elaborate explantation, but Tyson has done a lot of damage to the sport.

How so, you ask? His crazy antics. The rape, the biting, the tattoo, the bankruptcy, all of it. Since he was the champ at the time, he was a sort of representative of the sport. And a poor one he was. He disgraced the sport and took the honour, fair play and all that noble stuff out of it, and without that, all that’s left is two guys punching each othger in the face. The media focused more on his antics than the sport itself. But even today’s sensationalist media can take so much, and they got tired of Tyson, and let’s admit it, so did we. Once Tyson became lame, the sport, by association, became lame as well. Nowadays people who want their fight kicks turn to MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) such as UFC and Pride FC. Oh, and I looked up who’s the current Heavyweight Champ on Wikipedia. It’s Oleg Maskaev. Yeah, I don’t know who he is either.