By: Sean Crose
Yes, pay per view mania is running wild on Twitter. People want to know what kind of numbers last week’s Charlo featured pay per view broadcast did and then wish to discuss those numbers ad infinitum. Do they show boxing is dead? How do they compare to recent UFC pay per view numbers? Are they a sign of things to come for other pay per view boxing events? These and other pointless matters of discussion will be batted around for a while now, as boxing’s new breed of fan arguably cares more about the financial end of the sport than about the sport itself. Think of new breed fans as the sporting equivalent of someone who races to see how the latest Hollywood films are doing at the box office while actually loving few if any of those films. Such personality types are out there, and they have a lot to say about their particular interests. It seems they were born for the era of social media.
Look, it’s easy to get wrapped up in pay per view mania. People are inclined to like some fighters and/or promoters better than others and subsequently hope their personal favoirtes do well economically. It becomes almost a team sport where the winning team celebrates someone else making a whole lot of money. It may sound idiotic, but – again – it’s easy to get wrapped up in it all. That’s why there’s people online right now putting each other down for announcing the “wrong” figures. It is, overall, a form of entertainment, a way to let the time fly by. And honestly, there’s nothing morally or socially wrong with pay per view mania, it just takes away the important part of boxing. You know, the boxing part. Some fans are still actually into that sort of thing.
I’ve taken to Twitter myself recently urging legit fans to ignore the pay per view obsession. Numbers didn’t get me into the sport of boxing as an eight year old, the sport itself did. In fact, very few major fights are remembered for the money they brought in. Jack Dempsey’s 1921 battle with Georges Carpentier for the heavyweight title is the exception because it was the first major fight to ever break a million dollars at the gate. That was something worth remembering, though. In a hundred years from now is anyone going to remember how the Charlos did financially one night in 2020? People remember the fights for the fights. Remember how much any of the Ali-Frazier battles brought in? Probably not. You remember the fights themselves if you’ve seen them, though. There’s a reason for that.