By Norm Frauenheim–
A business always in search of an audience moves on to Errol Spence-Danny Garcia one week after Mike Tyson-Roy Jones Jr. left questions about where it is headed:
Back to the future.
Or back to nowhere.
For now, at least, it might not be limited to either-or. There are other potential options, like say a stop at the senior-citizen center. A dangerous sport, one seemingly limited to the young and fearless, drew a huge audience last Saturday for a couple of fighters older and vulnerable. Only their name recognition hasn’t eroded. The numbers don’t lie.
I called Tyson-Jones, an exhibition featuring a couple guys in their early fifties, “mostly frivolous.” I was wrong. Nothing frivolous about a reported 1.59 million pay-per-view buys and counting. At $49.99-a-buy, that’s $74.985 million and counting. That’s some serious business.
Spence and Garcia, who are a couple of decades younger, won’t approach that number, especially at a pay-per-view price tag $25 more than the Tyson-Jones fee. At $74.99, it’s hard to guess how many potential PPV customers just won’t buy. Even at the more reasonable price offered by the Tyson-Jones promoter, it’s safe to say that most in the Tyson-Jones audience won’t reach into their pocket.
Too expensive? Maybe. Still, the most optimistic guess is that the Spence-Garcia welterweight bout this Saturday on Fox will get a fraction of the buys that Tyson-Jones did. Plug in your own guesstimate here. But the reason for the expected small fraction exposes a perilous fault line in today’s boxing business.
There are no proven stars. The potential stars remain unproven, because they don’t fight each other anymore. There’s nothing new about that statement. But the numbers for Tyson-Jones, an exhibition in nostalgia, punctuates it with some powerful evidence. And urgency.
Maybe, Terence Crawford-versus-Spence emerges as a realistic possibility, post-Pandemic, from the Spence-Garcia fight on the Dallas Cowboys homefield in Arlington, Tex. But there are a couple of big ifs attached to that one. Spence has to win while also looking like the fighter he was before he was thrown from his Ferrari in October 2019. He hasn’t fought since then.
Garcia might have been at his best at a lighter weight, 140 instead of 147, but he’s been a giant killer and his counter left could do some real damage in early rounds when a tentative Spence is still trying to regain familiarity with his old work place.
Meanwhile, more senior citizens are bound to get out of their rockers for just a chance at a fraction of the money collected by Tyson, whose purse was reported to be $13 million. Call the bout an exhibition. Call it two guys in a brawl at a backyard barbecue, Snoop Dog’s apt description. Call if whatever. They didn’t pay Monopoly money. The cash real, enough to buy a lot of ribs.
Before Tyson-Jones, Oscar De La Hoya said he would watch carefully. De La Hoya, who turns 48 on Feb. 4, has been talking about a comeback. He had to like the numbers he saw from Tyson-Jones. He could have seen a new revenue stream for his company, Golden Boy Promotions, since the split with Canelo Alvarez.
Already, there are headlines about Evander Holyfield calling out Tyson for a rematch. After all, Holyfield still has one ear to give. There’s Buster Douglas, too, in what would be the inevitable rematch of his 1990 stunner over Tyson, one of the biggest upsets in the last century.
For a few years, there are endless possibilities. No telling what would happen to the rules. Endless possibilities there too. The Tyson-Jones rules were written to prohibit a knockout. In a few more years, a state commission might have to include a rule that you can’t hit your opponent over the head with a cane. OK, I’m getting carried away.
But the point is this: Boxing among seniors with name recognition and notoriety is not sustainable. The business goes nowhere without the younger generation that will fight this Saturday night. The young guns were there in the late 1970s and into the 1980s.
An aging Muhammad Ali fought a wrestler in Tokyo in 1976. George Foreman fought five guys in Toronto in 1975. But the circus came and went, mainly because Sugar Ray Leonard, Marvin Hagler, Roberto Duran and Thomas Hearns were there and preparing to fight each other through an era as rich as any in history.
It’s time for history to repeat itself. If it doesn’t, only the business will be history.
