Boxing journeymen: sport's biggest losers or unappreciated artists? | Hacker News Reader

Boxing journeymen: sport's biggest losers or unappreciated artists?

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86 pointsyitchelle26 comments

It makes me think of the typical "mooks" that you see in TV shows and movies. They're not there to pose any serious challenge to the protagonist; they're there to make the protagonist look good. He gets to show off, get the crowd on his side, and win. Later on, once their reputations are higher, they'll go up against serious contenders. The journeymen, of course, will go up against the next crop of up-and-comers.

Still, the fact that this exists means that boxing has a serious problem - their version of the minor leagues has such a dearth of talent that they have to resort to this WWE-style entertainment to make a name for themselves. You don't see this with MMA; there are enough people willing to fight earnestly that they don't need it.

I love MMA, but you see this in the minor leagues there too. Bleacher Report [0] highlights Shannon Ritch who spent many years showing up for a payday, take a loss, and avoid getting hurt. Bob Sapp [1] is another who moved on to "taking a payday" later in his career.

In both sports it's a terrible way to earn a payday. A couple hundred bucks for being a little further along the path towards lifetime brain damage.

[0] http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1068142-the-10-most-dubio...

[1] http://www.bloodyelbow.com/2014/5/18/5728820/bob-sapp-says-h...

I honestly never thought I would see a comment about Bob Sapp on Hacker News. Sad what happened to him. He was a physical specimen. Gave Nogueira a run for his money and beat some serious K-1 kickboxers.

Boxing is also suffering from decades of mismanagement and infighting. To me, that's more to blame for boxing's current state than MMA's rise in popularity.

>Boxing is also suffering from decades of mismanagement and infighting.

Exactly, and with no one there to really take care of the sport itself. With its promoter-driven model, it's about every party extracting maximum cash per the next event or two. The sanctioning bodies are too many and do very little to protect or grow the "boxing brand".

In UFC, MMA has the opposite.

What's sad about Sapp?

He makes a killing and takes no damage.

In his prime he made a killing. Now he gets 10-20K a fight to fly somewhere strange, make a scene at the weigh-in, and then tap at the first opportunity. It's not the worst way to make a living, but it doesn't look like the life of a guy who saved the millions he made in his heyday in Japan.

Yep, Bob Sapp on HN. Sort of made my morning!

That's because MMA is what's popular right now. There just aren't enough fighters getting into boxing these days, so you do what you have to in order to keep the money coming in.

My coach has had nothing but problems with landlords, where they use dirty tricks to get his gym out of the building (despite always being on time with rent). In the latest drama, he's sharing space with MMA guys. The landlord is fine with the MMA guys but says boxing has to go because it's "scaring the people in the crossfit gym downstairs". Seriously.

Getting new people in is difficult as well. Everybody seems to treat boxing with a mix of fear and contempt, and when you finally do get someone in with a real love for the sport, there's nobody for him to fight.

> has such a dearth of talent that they have to resort to this WWE-style entertainment to make a name for themselves

Nah that's not true. Boxing has a ton of talent, the problem is that it's a prize fighting game. Each boxer is an individual entrepreneur, they don't get a salary, they essentially get jobs like any freelancer in tech does. What that means is that they carefully try to build a record, a story, a brand. Look at Pacquiao, he won $50k for his second divisional world champion title. He fights maybe 2-3 times a year, and out of that $50k he has to fly his trainer, cutman, strength coach etc to the fight, rent a gym for a 10 week training camp and pay them for months, and pay prize fighting taxes. He may be left with a few thousand dollars a month. But after carefully building a brand, a story etc, he took another title fight earlier this year, he lost, and made more than $100 million.

This means each fighter avoids difficult fights because a record with multiple losses is like being a freelancer with a PUBLIC record of having failed to deliver multiple projects. Instead, you take smaller, easier projects with less risk, where you can overdeliver (KOs) and build a portfolio of 20-30 excellent performances. And then you cash out by making lots of money on difficult projects.

MMA or most sports for that matter aren't like that. In MMA you have a league system and you . You basically get a random draw in a cup and get ranked ahead if you win, and have to do mandatory matches against guys at your level. Or you get a random draw in a league and you end up matching everyone and the guy with the most points wins.

That exists in amateur boxing, and it's the reason why you see a lot of really great fighters fighting other great fighters. e.g. Mosley and Forrest didn't meet eachother as a pro for many years until they were both established. But as amateurs they fought each other long before.

That's why in MMA most guys get 20k to 500k. In boxing, most guys get next to nothing, even a top 20 p4p boxer in the world like Kell Brook makes just $200k fighting his best opponent yet in Shawn Porter, while two guys gross more than half a billion dollars in one night. Boxing is crazy like that. Most sports have one federation (e.g. Fifa, or the NBA, or NFL), boxing has tens of sanctioning bodies, and 4 major ones, each have multiple titles, even world titles (e.g. super world champ, champ, interim champ) per division, and there are 17 divisions. It's a crazy system and there's no way to bring financial sensibility into it like in amateur boxing, or professional sports outside of boxing. (e.g. the nr 1 football player in the world makes a 15m salary, but the average premier league player makes 3m a year. In boxing it's more like 200m vs 0.2m a year.)

That's why journeymen exist. To make money you need a promoter to organise the fight. And the promoter will never pit one talent in his stable against another talent in his stable because one has to lose which lowers the stock (and future earnings) of one of the talents. He also won't pit him against talent from another promoter, that's like one consultancy agency calling up another to cooperate and split the revenue, in reality that almost never happens as each agency wants to keep the money in house, especially when 1 agency has to lose. That's why journeymen exist, not because there is no talent, but because the only way to make money in boxing is to create records with few losses and overpowering performances, because boxers are prize fighters, not salaried, and they fight not under 1 federation, but for one of many different sanctioning bodies, whoever pays the most.

In short, it's not a lack of talent that causes journey men, not at all, it's the nature of pro boxing's prize fighting, which has matchmaking politics & economics completely different from most sports. MMA is not the exception, it's very much like all other sports in the world. Boxing is.

> That's why in MMA most guys get 20k to 500k.

Most MMA guys get a few hundred dollars for local/regional pro fights. UFC undercard fighters typically get a few thousand guaranteed (subtract out taxes and 3+ months of training expenses). Only at the very top of the sport do you see substantial purses. Professional MMA in the US is essentially a monopoly (UFC) with a huge population of aspiring fighters--it should be no surprise that payouts are kept just (barely) high enough to attract participants. The number of guys making real money at any given time probably don't number more than 100 or so. You'll see lots of semi-retired fighters doing ancillary things like opening gyms or traveling around doing fighting workshops/seminars.

excellent post, pro-boxing has always been bullshit

It's actually more about building up young prospects than a face/heel dynamic, as the article discusses a bit. A manager has to carefully calibrate increasingly difficult opponents for a 20 year old with potential for 20 fights or so. If the kid gets the shit beat out of him in his first three pro fights, he'll be terrified and ruined for the sport. "Raised up on a diet of tomato cans" as they say.

Just some context why I submitted this.

"Winning wouldn't have paid my bills for long and it's better to lose and go home to your house knowing your gas and electric bills have been paid."

Like all entertainment, there is a power law distribution to income. If you're, say, the 20th best in the world in a solo sport you probably do ok but earn orders of magnitude less than the best player. It makes better financial sense to participate in team sports if you can, for this reason. Or just get a job in something like tech where the distribution is much more equitable.

You would probably have to be well below 20th in the world for tech would make more financial since.

The 20th most successful technologist is probably a billionaire. The 20th most successful professional athlete isn't.

It's not THAT far off though.

This like has A-Rod at #20, at a cool $300 million.

http://www.celebritynetworth.com/list/top-50-richest-athlete...

Most of those are not professional athletes, a few where business men who got seed money or connections from sports. But also an Actor, Coach, Announcer, Commissioner, etc.

I mean there are a lot of billionaires who used to be cooks, but that's not how they became billionaires.

I think a lot of people that have never boxed will look at these guys and think "What a loser."

However, they are still much, much better than the vast majority of people that have ever boxed.

Anybody who can survive a few fights and keep going is a tough dude. the problem with boxing is that losing has a much higher price than other sports. I can challenge the No 1 tennis player every day and get only my ego hurt. In boxing every loss (and often even a win) comes with brain damage.

The reason these guys can take 300 fights, though, is they can get through it, look credible, and not get hurt. I'd say you'd be more likely to get brain damage during a title or truly competitive fight, not amongst an up-and-coming fighter and a professional "opponent".

I'll second that. I'm an amateur boxer, and these people are quite skilled, make no mistake about it. There's a lot of thought and technique that goes into being able to have participated in 300 fights.

What a wonderful bunch of silly (sensible) f*cking people. Just getting out there and getting the job done and wanting to be recognised but mainly doing the stuff. There are some at your work too. We all know who the workers are, really.

Boxing as a business (even more in US) is rotten to the core. From Don King [1] to Bob Arum [2] and many of the lesser known characters.

The most prominent outspoken person I've seen is the trainer and TV announcer, Teddy Atlas [3] who called the ESPN's "Friday Night Fight" till its end recently.

Unlike HBO announcers who never say anything that might be remotely controversial (in case it alienates powerful promoters like Bob Arum), Teddy calls out bad decision. Not only that he screams it out and has been constantly outspoken about "corrupt" judging [4]. I have watched him go off on this exact topic. How an "up and coming" fighter with a big name promoter seem to always get a favorable decision.

The problem with boxing (especially since PPV or HBO or Showtime is the main revenue stream for boxing) is, it's a bit like movie business. Stars sell tickets and they may not alway be the best actors or boxers in this case.

Just this past Saturday. There was a big ticket fight on HBO between Cotto and Geale. Cotto won with a TKO that was started with a head-butt to the face of Geal. It was very obvious[6]. Yet, not one HBO announcer said one thing about it while they were raving about the punching power of Cotto.

Audience is another problem. Take GGG (Gennady Golovkin) [5] he has to speak Spanish to appeal to the Spanish speaking population in order to get a decent paying fight. And no big name is going to fight him, because there is no upside. The names are ticket sellers and there is a big risk of losing to GGG. So instead they just fight a lesser fighter. Cash in a nice purse, and keep their boxing records high. And everyone is blabbering about "and...still the champion" of this and that title, which is really meaningless. While the viewers pay happily for a make-believe sports world which is only half-entertainment and half-sports.

Even UFC (which is a tad better) needs big finishers. So a fighters can win on points buy winning smartly, but those guys will never get a real shot unless they can knockout (preferably) or submit the opponent.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_King_(boxing_promoter)

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Arum

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teddy_Atlas

[4] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmSlMZ5zUbI

[5] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gennady_Golovkin

[6] - http://www.boxingnews24.com/2015/06/roach-cottos-big-power-w...

Commentators in boxing are actually pretty solid and have spoken millions of words about robberies, about corruption, about bad judging etc. It's an insult to imply only Teddy Atlas does this. Especially when Teddy is considered controversially within the sport, as both a guy who's been in boxing for a long time and respected for it, but also as a guy who is a complete idiot. I stopped taking his comments seriously quite a while ago.

In the Geale fight I saw the headbutt, too and I agree they should've mentioned it. I actually rewinded the video the same day to see if it was a headbutt and it was. But it's not controversial or corrupt because Geale was getting a total annihilation. Geale didn't even mention it, hell he quit, a sign that the headbutt wasn't at all a factor but that he simply wasn't able to do anything in the last 3 rounds and kept eating the left hand.

But yeah the point on viewership being nr 1 priority in boxing is completely true. Boxing has no league system, no rankings, no single federation. Its matchmaking politics behind closed doors, and those are based on viewership because that brings in the money, which often has nothing to do with making the most competitive matchup. And that indeed means people dodge GGG, a Kazakh who lives in Germany, fights the US, and who's got a 90% chance of knocking you out, is not a fight anyone wants to take because it's little money for lots of risk.

Lara's been talking about moving up to meet GGG though, that'd be interesting. And Froch in the UK, perhaps in Wembley again, that'd be interesting (and not easy for GGG either). After one of these fights GGG will probably have a big enough name to fight some big fights. Canelo's the next goldenboy, he makes money whoever he fights, and he weighs more than GGG even at SWW, so a GGG Canelo fight is likely for late 2016 or early 2017. Golovkin's biggest problem though is that 160 is just a really thin division right now and all the big opponents and money is below and above him. Even the nr 2 and 3 (ignoring Cotto) in Quillin and Lee are a joke, and ignoring them as they're dodging GGG and aren't special boxers anyway, GGG cleaned out the entire 160 division. There's nothing really left for him there, but without guys like Froch/Ward at 168, moving up isn't a great move either. And moving down to 154 makes little sense as SWW guys like Canelo weigh 174 for his 154 fight, while Golovkin weighs just 170 for his 160 fights. It's really hard for him.

About your Don King note, replace him with Al Haymon and you've got your list of 2 guys running boxing this day and age, Arum and Haymon. It's pretty insane.

And he carries the reminder of every glove that laid him down.

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