By now everybody knows that the St. Louis Cardinals came back from a three games-to-two deficit to beat the Texas Rangers in the 2011 World Series Friday Night.
For baseball aficionados, the Cardinals-Rangers World Series will go down as one of the best of all-time, with Thursday’s back and forth Game Six, specifically, earning recognition as, perhaps, the greatest single game in series history.
However, for what it’s worth, Cardinals-Rangers was also a lackluster sell to the general public with overall poor TV ratings.
And that brings us to the tie-in with boxing.
With few exceptions, boxing’s TV numbers are pretty much etched in stone. They are down from a few years ago, but remain steady and have actually shown a slight upward turn over the last year or so. Generally speaking, boxing’s basic cable outlet, Friday Night Fights on ESPN2 brings in an audience in the area of 550,000 to 700,000 while premium network, HBO, delivers anywhere from 1 million to 1.8 million viewers.
While these numbers are hardly Earth-shattering, like the Cardinals-Rangers World Series, boxing can still deliver an exciting show, even with few eyeballs watching. The science of solid matchmaking is key to delivering good fights to the loyal fight fans–and that’s something boxing often forgets.
Ideally, the sport would like to have massive audiences with plenty of new fans being brought in for each show. However, in the absence of mega-ratings, the second best option is to deliver exciting, interesting, and meaningful bouts that energize its hardcore base.
Over the last year, bouts like Pawel Wolak-Delvin Rodriguez and Ruslan Provodnikov-Mauricio Herrera on Friday Night Fights have delivered outstanding action that had the fans buzzing while word of the Hernan Marquez-Luis Concepcion war had fans searching throughout cyberspace for a Spanish language video of the contest from its Latin America broadcast home.
Great bouts and remarkable performances not only feed the most loyal of fans, they also serve as promotional films for potential fans and curious onlookers.
So, like the Cardinals-Rangers World Series thriller, even ratings duds can serve a purpose and help create a buzz for the sport. Great battles and thrilling match-ups are the real key to keeping boxing relevant and vibrant. So, it’s a shame that so few of the sport’s promoters or network outlets seems keen on putting together a really good show.
While the temptation may be to go the easy route and chase after a big name to deliver a cheap ratings boost, the sport’s power brokers also need to consider the post-fight impression generated by each of their shows.
A one-sided squash featuring a name fighter against a clearly inferior opponent might deliver one night of solid ratings, but it will also create a negative buzz among fans.
A case in point is October 22nd’s Nonito Donaire-Omar Narvaez dull, one-sided romp. Coming into the bout, Donaire was regarded as one of the sport’s most exciting up and coming stars. Post-Narvaez, that buzz has died down somewhat, leaving a bad taste in many mouths. Even though the poor contest was mostly Narvaez’s fault for an all-defense, no offense performance, Donaire and his reputation suffered the most. And, boxing, as a consequence, missed an opportunity to showcase one of its most exciting stars to an eager public.
With relatively few TV dates available, boxing can’t afford to throw away opportunities to show the world why it is, in its best moments, the world’s most exciting and entertaining sport. Not everything can be a ratings bonanza, but there’s no reason why boxing’s decision makers can’t make an effort to provide the fans quality match-ups that actually mean something.
Paul Magno was a licensed official in the state of Michoacan, Mexico and a close follower of the sport for more than thirty years. His work can also be found on Fox Sports and The Boxing Tribune. In the past, Paul has done work for Inside Fights, The Queensberry Rules and Eastside Boxing.
Sources:
The Boxing Tribune, The Boxing Tribune Editorials and Fight Reports, The Boxing Tribune