If you haven’t seen Denis Villanueve’s 2016 sci-fi classic Arrival, go watch that before reading the next few paragraphs. Or read them anyway. Or just skip them. You’ve only got one life to live and there’s no point subjecting yourself to the edicts of some weirdo from the Internet.
Anyway, the movie’s climax kicks off when a soldier, radicalized by paranoid media figures, sneaks a bomb into the spaceship hosting language exchanges between American government-aligned communications specialists and the extraterrestrials who parked said spaceship in Montanan airspace. The explosion critically injures one of the two spokesaliens, whom the protagonist had nicknamed Abbott and Costello.
When the protagonist, launched to safety in the nick of time but injured in the process, returns to ask Costello about its partner’s status, it replies, “Abbott is death process.”
Like Watchmen’s godlike Doctor Manhattan or the Tralfamadorians of Kurt Vonnegut’s seminal Slaughterhouse-Five, Arrival’s “heptapods” perceive time in its entirety instead of experiencing it linearly. Abbott did not die; the moments before, during, and after its passing all exist simultaneously. It is alive and always will be alive, dead and always will be dead, dying and always will be dying.
Sounds like a certain sport we love, doesn’t it?
Boxing’s demise is always approaching and never arriving. Op-eds bemoaning its demise are so numerous and reach so far back that they don’t even need writers anymore. I’m pretty certain they self-propagate in a fungal manner; leave an API draft open overnight and a new one will be waiting for you when you wake up.
That’s not to say it’s a “boy who cried wolf” situation. There’s very clearly a wolf there; it’s just taking its time and enjoying the sights. The sport, at least in America and the UK, has been in unfavorable straits for a decent chunk of the last couple decades. The landscape is littered with the remains of would-be disruptors like Triller and Roc Nation, whose grand ambitions produced only vast and trunkless legs of stone.
I never did end up using my mechanical engineering degree, having realized around junior year that I was a spectacular student and a god-awful engineer, but I do understand the importance of a free-body diagram. Even if I can’t hope to offer the answers, identifying the forces at play seems like a decent first step.
At the very least, we need to look beyond the common refrain of sanctioning body nonsense. Yes, they need reform, but they were this way even during the sport’s golden age. They’re the parasites Dr. House’s team treats halfway through the episode before the patient suddenly flatlines and they race to find the real culprit.
The issues plaguing viewers are well-documented. It’s hard to be a boxing fan, not in the sense of being emotionally taxing (though that’s definitely the case) but in the sense that it’s actively difficult. Top fighters generally compete two to three times per year and the fragmented broadcast model forces people to juggle multiple subscription services and budget for pay-per-views just to stay aware of what’s going on.
Let’s compare it to basketball. An NBA League Pass Premium subscription will run you around $160 per season in exchange for every single out-of-market game live or on demand with no commercials. That’s 82 games per team, and if your favorite player is a starter, you’ll probably see them in action at least half an hour each time.
If your favorite boxer is David Benavidez, you will end 2025 having spent a similar sum to see him in action for a maximum of 72 minutes. Boxing’s already at a disadvantage without the location-based loyalty of team sports; the declining exposure in mainstream media contributes to the sport’s flagging popularity, but this business model cannot produce a self-sustaining fan base when our collective memory is shorter than ever.
“Make the fights people want” is only part of the equation. You can’t host one super-card every two months and expect people to stay interested, especially when that setup inevitably buries potential stars on undercards that a good chunk of viewers may not even see.
This side of things, the “boxing as a product” side, seems fixable to me. It’ll take a good chunk of capital and some marketers savvy enough to tap into the public’s changing media habits, but I do think it’s possible to get the American public interested not just in one-off blockbusters helmed by old names but in your average ProBox-level shows. These barriers to entry were consciously raised and can be consciously lowered.
What might not be fixable are the issues facing the “boxing as a sport” side in America, which can be summed up as pure institutional hostility.
The need to share an athlete pool with basketball, baseball, and football is crippling; boxing offers less money, less fame, less physical safety, and less post-career support. Even those with the talent and drive to compete in the sweet science, whether they be too small for more lucrative sports or possessing a genuine love for boxing, have to go to extra lengths to cultivate that talent compared to their peers.
Consider amateur wrestling. It faces similar structural headwinds and offers no career prospects outside of transitioning to MMA or professional wrestling, but America still consistently appears near the top of the Olympic medal tables. The key difference with boxing is the ubiquity of scholastic wrestling programs; there’s nothing stopping most aspiring wrestlers from getting involved and living up to their potential. No need to invest more time and money than they’re already committing to their school lives.
Meanwhile, scholastic boxing basically doesn’t exist below the college level and collegiate boxing has devolved into an excuse for armed forces cadets to brutalize civilians. There’s a Jamie Foxx movie in the works about the USA’s legendary 1984 Olympic boxing squad, which snatched nine of the 12 available gold medals and featured multiple future world champions. As best as I can tell, the infrastructure to create that sort of lineup no longer exists.
Compare that to countries like Cuba and Uzbekistan, which possess a fraction of America’s population but produced astonishing ROI in their support of young talent.
”Fixing boxing” means more than just making sure the right two people fight each other or that the biggest names are compensated appropriately. Glitz and glamor aren’t enough; the groundwork needs to be laid for a steady influx of talent and a viewing model that engenders the sort of emotional investment that keeps a fan base alive.
