Why are the legends past their primes getting so much media buzz?
Lately the big fights have left me thinking less about boxing and more about show-biz. They have forced me to replace in my mind's eye the participants in Oscar De La Hoya-Floyd Mayweather and Bernard Hopkins-Winky Wright with characters from "Rocky V" and "Rocky VI." The latest big fight is no exception. It has me thinking less about Kid Dynamite and more about "Napoleon Dynamite."
Recently I got a hold of Napoleon's Uncle Rico and over a couple of steaks discussed our latest YouTube.com videos -- in his, he tosses a football around in a field, and in mine, I shadow box in my kitchen and call out the Motor City Cobra. He talked about the wonders of time travel and sold me a device that he promised would send me to the past.
Can Roy Jones Jr. prove that he's still worth all the attention he's getting for his fight against Felix Trinidad?
Taking it home, I strapped it to my head and nether regions and overruling the veto coming from my wife, turned it on. What do you know? It worked. I'm now back in 2001, walking gingerly, applying ointments, and reading about how 38-year-old Roy Jones Jr. will be taking on 34-year-old Felix Trinidad early in the New Year.
My take on this bout is almost the same as my take on the De La Hoya-Mayweather and Hopkins-Wright fights earlier this year. They're like Seinfeld: they're about nothing. But the Jones-Trinidad fight is worse than the others. At least the first two had championships at stake: Mayweather is undefeated and a pound-for-pound king and De La Hoya, although owning losses, had never really been dominated by anyone; Hopkins and Wright were both pound-for-pound top-ten fighters who hadn't been clearly beaten in years, and Hopkins was the light heavyweight champion of the world. There was stuff on the line in those fights but not enough to hold my attention.
This time it's different. With Roy Jones, we have a former middleweight, super middleweight, light heavyweight, and heavyweight champion. But he's also a fighter who has lost three of his last five fights: two of them by knockout and the other by running the last half of the fight. With Trinidad, we have a former welterweight, junior middleweight, and middleweight champion. But he's also a fighter who was dominated for 12 rounds by the above mentioned Wright and who before that was dominated by the above mentioned Hopkins. The Jones-Trinidad match up isn't the Stanley Cup finals but two guys playing street hockey with a net full of holes. So, I'm not too excited about it.
But some are. AP stories are being picked up in local papers; the signing of the contracts is being hyped on the internet; Don King will have the two contestants do color commentating on fights leading up to the match; and the venue being considered is none other than Madison Square Garden.
Recently, one newspaper picking up an AP story about boxing was a Korean daily, the Joongang Daily, a sister publication of the International Herald Tribune. It was maybe their first boxing story since they started a sports section earlier in the year. I thought it would have been about In Jin Chi, the Korean featherweight giving up his title for a K-1 shot, or Gerry Penalosa, the Filipino who won the bantamweight title and who had some great rivalries with Korean fighters. But it wasn't about either. It was about Trinidad and Jones.
I talked to Jee Ho Yoo, a prolific sports writer for the paper, and asked why this of all boxing stories was the one picked up when these two fighters are well past their primes.
"Jones and Trinidad are familiar names to general readers, faded or not."
But what about Israel Vazquez and Rafael Marquez who put on a fight of the year just the week before and who with youth and talent should be the face of the sport?
"I don't think too many readers lost sleep over the fact that they couldn't find the Marquez-Vazquez story in our paper. I certainly didn't receive any calls or e-mails over that. And there's a reason none of the sports cable stations here picked up that fight."
What's that reason?
"I think it has a lot to do with Koreans' presence in sports. In boxing, Chi was the last remaining champion. And he was quoted in some Korean papers as saying he was getting something like $9,000 a year. And before that he announced he was going into K-1. I'm sure a lot of people didn't know he had been a boxing champion.
"When I was a kid, I remember at one point, Korea had five, six international boxing champs at once. On TV [this was before cable], big boxing bouts were arguably more popular than playoff baseball."
So, I'm in 2001. Jee Ho Yoo thinks about boxing in the 1980s. And many sports fans watching boxing today are stuck in either the heavyweight era of the 1970s, the Hagler-Hearns-Leonard-Duran round robin of the 1980s, or the heavyweights of the 1990s. Boxing has become a sentimental journey for many where the real fights that are being aired are being ignored for remembrances of things past or for fighters past their primes. The rise of other sports is partly to blame for this. But boxing holds a large portion of it, too. And it will hold more and more of the blame if it keeps staging fights that are sentimental rather than meaningful, fights like Trinidad versus Jones.
And Don King is great at playing on sentiment as he showed at a recent conference call announcing the fight. What better way to make us all misty eyed than to allude to the man who called himself "the Greatest"?
"This [Jones-Trinidad fight] is the first time," Don King says, "since the 'Rumble in the Jungle' where you make the fight, and we don't even have television."
Since it's Trinidad, a fighter coming out of retirement, facing Jones, a fighter who was knocked down and out and off of HBO, we can see how they became free agents. But, hey, compare this fight to Ali-Foreman to sell it by all means.
How about the fighters themselves? What physical attributes will they bring to the ring?
Fighting at a catch weight of 170 pounds, Trinidad will be 23 pounds over his best weight and Jones will be 30 pounds less than he was on his biggest night, when he broke John Ruiz's nose for a heavyweight title in 2003.
Trinidad will be fighting at the highest weight of his career, but he insists "I will feel great at that weight and it will be a great fight."
Jones, who hasn't been at 170 since 1996, admits it will be a challenge. "I don't like it, but for a big fight you have to do those things. It is a wonderful fight and I'm not going to let a few pounds ruin it. Of course it is going to be very difficult. Of course I'm not going to like it."
Who will win? The obese or the weight drained? It's a tricky question, the kind that should be answered not in a boxing ring but on the reality show "The Biggest Loser."
What they are fighting for -- besides money -- is not clear to me.
"Tito is a great champion," says Jones. "And I know that he has left behind a great legacy. If someone like that comes to challenge you, how can you turn that down?"
Trinidad, too, speaks as if it is still 2001. "I always want to fight great fighters and I am coming back to fight Roy Jones Jr. because he is one of the greatest in the sport."
So, nothing is at stake except the abstract idea of legacy and the illusion that these are two current pound-per-pound fighters fighting. It's the first time these one-time great fighters are swindling the public. Their other comebacks weren't like this one.
When Trinidad made his comeback at 160 pounds to face hard-punching Ricardo Mayorga in 2004 and then Wright in 2005, I thought it could be a jumping off point for a fight with Hopkins or Jermain Taylor. When he lost, it seemed he had nowhere else to go but retirement.
When Jones was knocked out by Antonio Tarver and then by Glenn Johnson in 2004, and then lost to Tarver again a year later, I thought he should retire. But when he came back with victories over Prince Badi Ajamu last year and then stepped up against undefeated Anthony Hanshaw this summer, I thought, okay, he's rebuilding and could still be a force in the light heavyweight division. He's coming back. I thought if he keeps fighting and beating the young guys, he not only adds to his legacy but also takes himself to a legitimate shot against the light heavyweight champion, Hopkins. If he loses to a young fighter -- Chad Dawson, Adrian Diaconu, or Elvir Muriqui -- he adds to the lifeblood of boxing, giving those guys name recognition, a valuable commodity if they want to land the big money fight on HBO and Showtime. Jones had done that already for Antonio Tarver and Glenn Johnson.
A fight against Trinidad, however, is a sidetrack, a one-off that benefits neither the light heavyweight division nor boxing but only the coffers of the two participants. Oh, yeah. And the bank account of that guy with high hair, the guy shouting "Only in America!"
As much as I would have loved this match in 2001, I think it only damages boxing now since it takes media attention away from fighters who are actually competing in divisions, between each other, and against real world champions.
There is nothing wrong with fighters putting some cash in their pockets since most in the past have not had nearly enough put in them. Just ask In Jin Chi. But I like the sport of boxing as a whole too much not to speak out against the damage this kind of show-biz production does to it.
But then again maybe if I can't beat them, I can join them. I should get in to the big money thing. I will recharge my time travel machine, strap it on (my wife fumes as I write this), strengthen its dose, and head back to 1989 on my own sentimental journey. After all, if Trinidad-Jones sells, maybe I can arrange Leonard-Duran IV. Because I'm afraid Trinidad-Jones won't look much better and mean even less to boxing than Leonard-Duran III did.
Lately the big fights have left me thinking less about boxing and more about show-biz. They have forced me to replace in my mind's eye the participants in Oscar De La Hoya-Floyd Mayweather and Bernard Hopkins-Winky Wright with characters from "Rocky V" and "Rocky VI." The latest big fight is no exception. It has me thinking less about Kid Dynamite and more about "Napoleon Dynamite."
Recently I got a hold of Napoleon's Uncle Rico and over a couple of steaks discussed our latest YouTube.com videos -- in his, he tosses a football around in a field, and in mine, I shadow box in my kitchen and call out the Motor City Cobra. He talked about the wonders of time travel and sold me a device that he promised would send me to the past.
Can Roy Jones Jr. prove that he's still worth all the attention he's getting for his fight against Felix Trinidad?
Taking it home, I strapped it to my head and nether regions and overruling the veto coming from my wife, turned it on. What do you know? It worked. I'm now back in 2001, walking gingerly, applying ointments, and reading about how 38-year-old Roy Jones Jr. will be taking on 34-year-old Felix Trinidad early in the New Year.
My take on this bout is almost the same as my take on the De La Hoya-Mayweather and Hopkins-Wright fights earlier this year. They're like Seinfeld: they're about nothing. But the Jones-Trinidad fight is worse than the others. At least the first two had championships at stake: Mayweather is undefeated and a pound-for-pound king and De La Hoya, although owning losses, had never really been dominated by anyone; Hopkins and Wright were both pound-for-pound top-ten fighters who hadn't been clearly beaten in years, and Hopkins was the light heavyweight champion of the world. There was stuff on the line in those fights but not enough to hold my attention.
This time it's different. With Roy Jones, we have a former middleweight, super middleweight, light heavyweight, and heavyweight champion. But he's also a fighter who has lost three of his last five fights: two of them by knockout and the other by running the last half of the fight. With Trinidad, we have a former welterweight, junior middleweight, and middleweight champion. But he's also a fighter who was dominated for 12 rounds by the above mentioned Wright and who before that was dominated by the above mentioned Hopkins. The Jones-Trinidad match up isn't the Stanley Cup finals but two guys playing street hockey with a net full of holes. So, I'm not too excited about it.
But some are. AP stories are being picked up in local papers; the signing of the contracts is being hyped on the internet; Don King will have the two contestants do color commentating on fights leading up to the match; and the venue being considered is none other than Madison Square Garden.
Recently, one newspaper picking up an AP story about boxing was a Korean daily, the Joongang Daily, a sister publication of the International Herald Tribune. It was maybe their first boxing story since they started a sports section earlier in the year. I thought it would have been about In Jin Chi, the Korean featherweight giving up his title for a K-1 shot, or Gerry Penalosa, the Filipino who won the bantamweight title and who had some great rivalries with Korean fighters. But it wasn't about either. It was about Trinidad and Jones.
I talked to Jee Ho Yoo, a prolific sports writer for the paper, and asked why this of all boxing stories was the one picked up when these two fighters are well past their primes.
"Jones and Trinidad are familiar names to general readers, faded or not."
But what about Israel Vazquez and Rafael Marquez who put on a fight of the year just the week before and who with youth and talent should be the face of the sport?
"I don't think too many readers lost sleep over the fact that they couldn't find the Marquez-Vazquez story in our paper. I certainly didn't receive any calls or e-mails over that. And there's a reason none of the sports cable stations here picked up that fight."
What's that reason?
"I think it has a lot to do with Koreans' presence in sports. In boxing, Chi was the last remaining champion. And he was quoted in some Korean papers as saying he was getting something like $9,000 a year. And before that he announced he was going into K-1. I'm sure a lot of people didn't know he had been a boxing champion.
"When I was a kid, I remember at one point, Korea had five, six international boxing champs at once. On TV [this was before cable], big boxing bouts were arguably more popular than playoff baseball."
So, I'm in 2001. Jee Ho Yoo thinks about boxing in the 1980s. And many sports fans watching boxing today are stuck in either the heavyweight era of the 1970s, the Hagler-Hearns-Leonard-Duran round robin of the 1980s, or the heavyweights of the 1990s. Boxing has become a sentimental journey for many where the real fights that are being aired are being ignored for remembrances of things past or for fighters past their primes. The rise of other sports is partly to blame for this. But boxing holds a large portion of it, too. And it will hold more and more of the blame if it keeps staging fights that are sentimental rather than meaningful, fights like Trinidad versus Jones.
And Don King is great at playing on sentiment as he showed at a recent conference call announcing the fight. What better way to make us all misty eyed than to allude to the man who called himself "the Greatest"?
"This [Jones-Trinidad fight] is the first time," Don King says, "since the 'Rumble in the Jungle' where you make the fight, and we don't even have television."
Since it's Trinidad, a fighter coming out of retirement, facing Jones, a fighter who was knocked down and out and off of HBO, we can see how they became free agents. But, hey, compare this fight to Ali-Foreman to sell it by all means.
How about the fighters themselves? What physical attributes will they bring to the ring?
Fighting at a catch weight of 170 pounds, Trinidad will be 23 pounds over his best weight and Jones will be 30 pounds less than he was on his biggest night, when he broke John Ruiz's nose for a heavyweight title in 2003.
Trinidad will be fighting at the highest weight of his career, but he insists "I will feel great at that weight and it will be a great fight."
Jones, who hasn't been at 170 since 1996, admits it will be a challenge. "I don't like it, but for a big fight you have to do those things. It is a wonderful fight and I'm not going to let a few pounds ruin it. Of course it is going to be very difficult. Of course I'm not going to like it."
Who will win? The obese or the weight drained? It's a tricky question, the kind that should be answered not in a boxing ring but on the reality show "The Biggest Loser."
What they are fighting for -- besides money -- is not clear to me.
"Tito is a great champion," says Jones. "And I know that he has left behind a great legacy. If someone like that comes to challenge you, how can you turn that down?"
Trinidad, too, speaks as if it is still 2001. "I always want to fight great fighters and I am coming back to fight Roy Jones Jr. because he is one of the greatest in the sport."
So, nothing is at stake except the abstract idea of legacy and the illusion that these are two current pound-per-pound fighters fighting. It's the first time these one-time great fighters are swindling the public. Their other comebacks weren't like this one.
When Trinidad made his comeback at 160 pounds to face hard-punching Ricardo Mayorga in 2004 and then Wright in 2005, I thought it could be a jumping off point for a fight with Hopkins or Jermain Taylor. When he lost, it seemed he had nowhere else to go but retirement.
When Jones was knocked out by Antonio Tarver and then by Glenn Johnson in 2004, and then lost to Tarver again a year later, I thought he should retire. But when he came back with victories over Prince Badi Ajamu last year and then stepped up against undefeated Anthony Hanshaw this summer, I thought, okay, he's rebuilding and could still be a force in the light heavyweight division. He's coming back. I thought if he keeps fighting and beating the young guys, he not only adds to his legacy but also takes himself to a legitimate shot against the light heavyweight champion, Hopkins. If he loses to a young fighter -- Chad Dawson, Adrian Diaconu, or Elvir Muriqui -- he adds to the lifeblood of boxing, giving those guys name recognition, a valuable commodity if they want to land the big money fight on HBO and Showtime. Jones had done that already for Antonio Tarver and Glenn Johnson.
A fight against Trinidad, however, is a sidetrack, a one-off that benefits neither the light heavyweight division nor boxing but only the coffers of the two participants. Oh, yeah. And the bank account of that guy with high hair, the guy shouting "Only in America!"
As much as I would have loved this match in 2001, I think it only damages boxing now since it takes media attention away from fighters who are actually competing in divisions, between each other, and against real world champions.
There is nothing wrong with fighters putting some cash in their pockets since most in the past have not had nearly enough put in them. Just ask In Jin Chi. But I like the sport of boxing as a whole too much not to speak out against the damage this kind of show-biz production does to it.
But then again maybe if I can't beat them, I can join them. I should get in to the big money thing. I will recharge my time travel machine, strap it on (my wife fumes as I write this), strengthen its dose, and head back to 1989 on my own sentimental journey. After all, if Trinidad-Jones sells, maybe I can arrange Leonard-Duran IV. Because I'm afraid Trinidad-Jones won't look much better and mean even less to boxing than Leonard-Duran III did.
