In some ways, Saturday night's welterweight title bout between Filipino boxing superstar Manny Pacquiao and "Sugar" Shane Mosley is also a fight for the sport's future. Boxing has relied for a dozen years on revenue from HBO's airings of big fights, but this time, Pacquiao promoter Top Rank cut a deal to air the pay-per-view matchup on Showtime — and the internet — with some friendly commercial promotion by CBS, too. Top Rank chairman Bob Arum hopes one day to get boxing back on network TV, where it created a generation of fans in the '70s and '80s. Is this the first jab in boxing's big comeback?
This is boxing's best shot in years: The Showtime/CBS deal is already paying off, in terms of buzz and box office receipts, says Kevin Iole at Yahoo! Sports. Top Rank's master plan is to use big draw Pacquiao as "a Trojan horse to get fans who haven't watched boxing regularly and lure advertisers who drifted away in the 1980s back to the sport." And if enough advertisers return to support free network broadcasts, the sport will really be in business.
"CBS gives Pacquiao-Mosley a prime-time push"
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Sorry, boxing has turned into a bore: Sure, "people have been predicting boxing's demise since Jack Johnson stopped Jim Jeffries" in 1910, says Gautham Nagesh in The Atlantic. But while it's still huge outside the U.S., boxing isn't ready for the big time here: The heavyweight class is a snooze, long dominated by two Ukrainian brothers, and American fans will stay on the sidelines until Pacquiao fights U.S. champ Floyd "Money" Mayweather — no sure thing. Everything else is a sideshow.
"5 reasons boxing may go mainstream again..."
Time will tell: "I honestly can see this thing swinging either way," says Tim Starks in The Queensberry Rules. Though the CBS/Showtime deal looked "downright revolutionary" when it was inked, it's begun to seem "more incremental." CBS was once in talks to pick up an "actual boxing match," but that didn't happen. Now it comes down to the numbers. We'll only see boxing on network TV again if the Pacquiao-Mosley fight sells really well.
"Manny Pacquiao vs. Shane Mosley: Wherein the network airing the mega-fight..."
Continue reading for free
We hope you're enjoying The Week's refreshingly open-minded journalism.
Subscribed to The Week? Register your account with the same email as your subscription.
-
6 new horror novels to read this fallThese upcoming releases will have you on the edge of your seat — or hiding under the covers
-
6 bucolic homes in New Hampshire
Feature Featuring an island house in Meredith and a private pond in Lee
-
Etaf Rum recommends 6 empowering reads centered around women
Feature The author suggests works by Zora Neale Hurston, Sylvia Plath and more
