I've long asserted that any real businessman, if he chose to get his hands dirty in the world of boxing, would easily own the sport in a relatively short period of time. The boxing business is a creature of habit-- a short-sighted, spiteful, unnecessarily sleazy habit. Like a two-bit thug who makes a hundred bucks a week via grift when he could make two hundred flipping … [Read more...]
Moneyball, Money Punch: The Southpaw
by Fox Doucette “Every time you talk about behavioral economics I always think of examples from sports.” As your columnist prepares for tomorrow's Econ final exam with the intensity of a fighter preparing for a title contest, that bit of dialogue from a conversation between me and the professor in that class rattles around my head, especially since I can't help but think that … [Read more...]
The Last American Pay-Per-View: The Southpaw
by Fox Doucette In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond posed the thought experiment of “what was the villager on Easter thinking when he cut down the last tree on the island?” That is to say, once the very last natural resource essential to a society had been harvested, never (at least until European colonialism) to be replaced, just what did people expect to do with … [Read more...]
These Columns Now Cost $50: The Southpaw
By Fox Doucette To the surprise of absolutely nobody, the Hopkins-Dawson PPV was a complete disaster financially. Kevin Iole reported via Twitter that the fight did 40,000 buys, and Dan Rafael tweeted that it was “less than 100,000”. Of course this is the case---Chad Dawson couldn't draw flies if you covered him in shit and Hopkins, beloved though he may be among old men and … [Read more...]
A Child’s Guide to Boxing Economics
by Paul Magno From the general lack of urgency among the boxing media and fans, one would never know that the sport we love is on the precipice of a deadly fall. As live gates become less and less of a factor in determining fighter's purses and as boxing gets pushed further and further out of the mainstream, it seems obvious that we are all in desperate need of some … [Read more...]