by Fox Doucette
In the past two years, three of the four major sports in America found their owners deciding to simply take their ball and go home, knowing that the players in those sports would eventually fold like a bad poker hand under the threat of losing their livelihood in the form of a canceled season or two. The NFL didn’t even miss a game, mainly because a week without fantasy football would be a national crisis worthy of President Obama having Roger Goodell waterboarded.
I thought of this as I read through some old articles about how shoddy the treatment of boxers is. Grand-scheme, your four-round guys are pretty much in it for a few bucks and a free brain scan, never mind that a brain scan wouldn’t be necessary if they weren’t taking a few bucks for getting repeatedly punched in the head. Your mid-card guys and FNF guys do a little better; a guy like Ruslan Provodnikov can make a decent living, and it beats the hell out of filing TPS reports all day, even if the end result doesn’t feel that way to the Russian’s opponents. I’m sure Mauricio Herrera—the only guy to beat Provodnikov, and he needed a gift decision from idiot judges to do it—thinks he got more than his money’s worth.
The big-time main event guys, the Pacquiaos and Mayweathers of the world, they do better. Millions, rather than a few thousand. Mayweather, being largely in charge of his own promotion, has enough money to buy nice houses and enough time on his hands to find women to bring to those houses in order to beat the shit out of them and attract the attention of the Nevada authorities for a summertime stint in the pokey.
Pacquiao is going more the Mike Tyson-Don King route as far as letting his legion of hangers-on and his promoter rob him blind, but considering what would otherwise have been in store for him as a poor street urchin from a Third World tropical shithole (specifically General Santos City, Philippines), I’m sure most of his fellows from GSC would trade problems with him.
With all this talk about treatment of the fighters, there is occasional grumbling that boxers (and MMA fighters—consider their situation under a single entity, outside the scope of this column but worthy of mention) should somehow find a way to form a union, refusing to participate in fights until they got fair wages and medical care, bargained for collectively.
I shouldn’t have to explain how stupid this is.
After all, with the exception of the world champions, boxers are, in essence, expendable. A guy ducks out of a main event on ESPN, they’ve got a replacement ready to fight in less time than it takes me to type up an update to the FNF preview in time I should’ve been using doing something else. Zsolt Erdei pulls out of an HBO show? Call Antonin Decarie and Alex Perez. Fans won’t notice the difference. Even Josesito Lopez got a Folger’s switch treatment—at an FNF show in Reno last May, he pulled out, and Chris Arreola was in faster than you can say “comped casino buffet after you knock out Kendrick Releford.”
Mayweather and Pacquiao and their ilk wouldn’t go for a union either. Can you imagine Floyd Mayweather sharing a cent of his money with anyone? If there were any kind of revenue sharing, Mayweather would appear in public kissing Oscar De La Hoya’s ass like a 60s draft dodger trying to convince the recruiter to keep him stateside.
Even if there were a union, and even if that union somehow managed to avoid getting locked out like football players, there’s another element of unionized sports labor that would be a constant sticking point.
Remember “basketball-related income” and how you couldn’t swing a dead cat in Bristol without hitting some ESPN talking head going on about how the players and owners couldn’t come up with a BRI figure that would bring an end to the NBA’s labor problems in time to save the season (never mind that we got 66 games and one of the best playoffs in recent memory)? About 57-43 and 50-50 and (see if this sounds familiar) 55-45?
55-45. Where have we heard that one before?
Imagine every Pacquiao-Mayweather negotiating process since rumors first floated around years ago that the now welterweight Manny wanted a piece of the other big name at the weight. PED testing, splits of the money, commissions, venues, gloves, the whole nine yards.
Now imagine if every single fight, every fighter, every TV network, every promoter, had to get together every few years to hammer out a collective bargaining agreement with terms the same way Pacquiao and Mayweather have “negotiated” in their efforts to get together in the ring. Imagine if the end result of failure in that negotiating room was either no boxing at all, or else Steve Smoger being replaced in every title fight as referee by some clueless replacement nobody like Gary Ritter or Joe Cortez. You thought Packers-Seahawks was bad.
Bottom line, let’s just stop talking about reforming the sport except as a thought experiment. If the grown-ups can’t get it right (and really, how the hell did baseball get exempted from this?), there’s no hope for the overgrown toddlers in charge of the fight game. Nancy Pelosi will suck John Boehner’s dick on the House floor on national television before boxing will get its shit together.
Fox Doucette covers Friday Night Fights for The Boxing Tribune. His weekly column, The Southpaw, appears on Thursdays. Fan mail, hate mail, and 57% of the NHL’s hockey-related income can be sent to beatcap@gmail.com.
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