Who says we don’t cover it all at AllSportsDiscussion.com? Chris Henderson sent us a story on the sport of boxing. I hope the boxing fans out there enjoy this. It’s a good piece.
There’s a very strange dichotomy at work in boxing. The best practitioners of the craft don’t always make the most money. Fighters that are defensive minded strategists are maligned by the mainstream fans as ‘boring’ while free swinging knockout artists with no defensive skills whatsoever generate big PPV buyrates. For a long time the ‘pound for pound’ best fighter in the world, Floyd Mayweather Jr., had the ‘boring’ rap which many suggested would limit his marketability. He responded by making himself the biggest ‘heel’ in the sport which motivated fans to buy his fights hoping to see him get beat.
Mayweather’s marketing strategy was brilliant and has made him very wealthy. Now Andre Ward is wondering what he has to do to put himself atop boxing’s PPV moneymakers. He’s definitely good enough—at 27-0 he’s undefeated and downright dominant. The bad news from a marketing standpoint is that he personifies ‘defensive minded strategist’. He also doesn’t have a Mayweather-esque personality that could make fans hate him. He’s the diametric opposite of that and is one of the most respected and well liked fighters in the sport.
All of that brings us back to the starting point. Boxing purists respect nothing more than a classy, technically skilled, defensive minded and tactical champion. The problem is that the mainstream fans would rather watch hard slugging knockout artists. That can make gambling on boxing at sports betting site like this a challenge. Which style is better, the knock out artist or technical boxer. That dynamic is nothing new and its not going to change which leaves Ward as a great fighter than the ‘average Joe’ won’t pay to see.
Ward is planning to respond with the old ‘if you can’t beat them join them’ strategy. At least to some degree—in a recent interview Ward indicated the three PPV fights that he’s got on his future agenda and suggested that a stylistic change might be in the offing to help sell them. Suggesting that he’s willing to ‘drop hands and go toe to toe’ Ward obviously realizes that this might be in his best interest financially.
The three fighters that Ward considers ‘PPV worthy’ are Carl Frosh, Julio Caesar Chavez Jr. and Gennady Golovkin. All solid competitors but at the same time it’s easy to see Ward winning easy decisions over them with his vintage style. He’s insisting that he’s not going to do that pointing to Floyd Mayweather’s recent fight against Marcos Maidana where according to Ward ‘Mayweather made a statement’. In Ward’s case he may be more interested in what happens on his bank ‘statement’ than making one in the ring.
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