BOXING, UNDEAD

The biggest boxing match of the year—this coming Saturday’s fight between Floyd Mayweather, the brash virtuoso, and Saúl “Canelo” Álvarez, the soft-spoken young idol—recently got some free publicity on an ESPN program called “Pardon the Interruption.” The concept of the show is that two commentators, Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon, deliver strong and sometimes plausible opinions about sports. One day last week, Wilbon paid grudging tribute to Mayweather, whom he had previously criticized. “He is the last guy out there, for a sport that is all but dead,” Wilbon said. He told Kornheiser, “You need to stay up and watch this fight, because this is it—it’s over for boxing after this.”

Suffice it to say that, during the past few decades, boxing fans have become, like Mayweather in the ring, rather defensive. The sport they love has regularly been pronounced dead, and somehow the regularity of this pronouncement has had the effect of increasing, rather than decreasing, their sensitivity to it. Kevin Iole, who covers boxing for Yahoo! Sports, foundWilbon and Kornheiser guilty of “pure laziness.” Mark Ortega, on the Web site of The Ring,criticized their “limited knowledge” of the sport. And Dan Rafael, ESPN’s indispensible boxing reporter, took to Twitter to declare his colleagues “ignorant and/or lazy,” adding, “I declare afternoon sports talk banter dead.”

You might say that Wilbon was merely engaging in a tactic familiar to any boxing fan: hyping the next big fight, using whatever claim is most convenient. Certainly the executives at Golden Boy, one of the promotional companies behind the fight, couldn’t have been unhappy to hear Wilbon saying, “You need to stay up and watch this fight.” And it’s true, too, that boxing isn’t nearly as popular today as it was half a century ago. “What other names do you know? You know the Klitschko name,” Kornheiser said, referring to the Ukrainian brothers, Vitali and Wladimir, who have dominated the heavyweight division for nearly a decade. “That’s it.”

Kornheiser was exaggerating (even casual sports fans know about Manny Pacquiao, who is scheduled to fight in November, in Macau), but perhaps not by much. No doubt plenty of ESPN viewers are unfamiliar with Andre Ward, the Bay Area super-middleweight who might be the second-best fighter on the planet, after Mayweather. And Gennady Golovkin—a ruinouspuncher from Kazakhstan, who ranks among boxing’s most exciting stars—is so obscure that ifSports Illustrated were to put him on the cover, readers might wonder if they were beinghoaxed. Last week, at a press conference in New York, Richard Schaefer, the C.E.O. of Golden Boy, shared the results of a nationwide survey that found that boxing inspired the seventh-highest “level of interest” of any sport: twenty-one per cent of respondents said they had some interest, putting boxing somewhere between hockey (twenty-five per cent) and mixed martial arts (seventeen per cent). It tells you something about boxing’s difficulties that Schaefer wasn’t bemoaning this finding—he was celebrating it.

Devoted boxing fans might nevertheless draw an encouraging lesson from this gloomy recent history: it turns out that a sport can die a kind of death and nevertheless survive. When Wilbon says that “it’s over for boxing,” what he really means (if he means it at all) is that boxing is over for him. This, more or less, is what Howard Cosell said more than thirty years ago, yet fighters kept fighting, and a smaller but no less captivated group of fans kept watching. Live boxing is broadcast on cable television just about every weekend of the year, and scarcely a month goes by without something memorable—something awesome, in one or more senses of the word—happening in a boxing ring.

This past Saturday night, at a casino outside Palm Springs, a legendary Mexican veteran named Rafael Márquez faced a tough but rather undistinguished fighter named Efrain Esquivias. Márquez is much slower than he was in his prime, but he was hoping for a late-career revival (last year, his older brother, Juan Manuel, knocked out Pacquiao), and for a few rounds it seemed likely that he would prevail. Esquivias was aggressive but rather predictable; Márquez ate some punches, while slipping and countering others. In the fourth round, Tim Starks, a leading boxing blogger, tweeted, “This fight is both good and sad.” But Márquez’s punches weren’t very powerful, and as Esquivias realized this, he grew even more aggressive, and the old veteran started looking less like a competitor and more like a victim. “This fight is no longer good and sad. It is just sad,” Starks wrote, a few rounds later. In the ninth round, after Esquivias knocked Márquez onto his backside with a straight right hand, the referee stopped the fight, and no one—not even Márquez—complained. As Márquez prepared for a post-fight trip to the hospital (where he was reportedly diagnosed with an orbital fracture), Mauro Ranallo, the blustery Showtime announcer, said, “Great stuff, there.” Ranallo sounded too glib, but there was something transfixing (and, of course, sad) about watching Márquez fail to do something he probably never should have tried.

Viewers hungry for a more cheerful spectacle got one in the main event, which was a lot less sad, and plenty of fun—while it lasted. Seth Mitchell, a former college football player, has spent the past few years trying to convince the country that he is a credible heavyweight boxer. After a string of wins, he suffered an upset loss last year, and then won, not very convincingly, in the rematch. To prove himself, Mitchell was fighting Cristobal Arreola, a lovable Californian known for his powerful fists and for his fluctuating commitment to hard workouts and a healthy diet. Arreola didn’t think Mitchell deserved to be in the ring with him, and once Mitchell had been buffeted around the canvas for a few minutes, the referee was inclined to agree. Having essentially debunked the Seth Mitchell phenomenon, Arreola was gracious in victory. “Trust me, he hits hard,” he told Jim Gray, during the post-fight interview. “Because when he hit me a couple times, I was like, ‘Holy shit! A lot harder than I thought’—pardon me, sorry, I apologize.” Arreola is known for cursing during post-fight interviews, but on the premium cable networks where boxing mainly lives, no one seems to mind. Most of the time, the rest of the world isn’t paying attention, anyway.

Mayweather-Álvarez is not the end of an era, but it is a rarity: a fight that everyone will be talking about. Then, when it’s over, boxing fans can look forward to the next batch of promising fights (Stevenson vs. Cloud! Haye vs. Fury!), and everyone else can go back to ignoring boxing. Maybe this isn’t an ideal state of affairs—but then maybe, in an ideal world, boxing wouldn’t exist at all. In this world, it does exist, still, and those of us who love it would be greedy to ask for anything more.