Boxing doesn’t have seasons, or much boxing either, anymore, but it does have pay-per-view events that mark artificial seasons. These happen late in winter, spring, summer and fall. This year’s late-winter and late-summer offerings were weak and dreadful, respectively. This year’s late-fall season kicked-off Saturday with the first episode of “24/7 Pacquiao/Margarito.”
If you’re not thinking that it would be better to read a column about boxing than one about television about boxing, you should be. To such a concern I offer the merest anecdote:
One summer, after suffering through a semester of Eng102 at Arizona State University I happened on its professor in the ASU Rec Center and told him what I thought of his class. And he replied, “Boring to you? I had to teach the damned thing.”
We make a mistake if we discount the need for boxing on television, though, and that is why we take a look at HBO’s “24/7” program and its effect. Much as we make of competitive undercard matches and b-side fighters in main events, network researchers snicker at our concerns because they know what we do not believe: Once the a-side fighter is in place, the success of a pay-per-view is determined by “24/7.”
Mayweather-Mosley in May was a more compelling spectacle than Pacquiao-Clottey in March, as we all knew it would be, but not twice as compelling. The difference in pay-per-view sales these shows garnered, if those numbers are to be believed, was roughly 100 percent. That is, Mayweather-Mosley sold about twice as many pay-per-view buys as Pacquiao-Clottey. One had “24/7.” One did not.
Look, “24/7” is not for you, the serious fan. It is for the wife or father of a casual fan. It is about helping a casual fan attain $50 of permission from his spouse or guardian by offering variable plotlines. That’s how Pacquiao’s puppy featured prominently in “24/7” before the fight with Miguel Cotto; that’s why we now know Margarito’s wife hates her husband’s flatulence.
Super fights need that sort of promotion today because there are no longer a million serious boxing fans in the United States. Boxing lost most of its fans when it left network television, though it still pretends otherwise. It lost more fans when it put an additional purchase price on meaningful fights. And it lost another healthy chunk this year when it promised something real, failed, then delivered, instead, something broken.
Which gets me thinking about Mexico. Today, having backed away from the failed American model, Mexico has great fights on basic cable. It’s a new thing. Mexicans are embracing it enthusiastically. When I talk to folks in Tamaulipas or Jalisco, now, I hear about fights in Germany and Poland I did not know about and could not have seen if I had. Beyond that enthusiasm, though, is a coming sadness.
Boxing did not suffer too much when American kids could no longer watch it on public airwaves. That is, American boxing suffered, suffered terribly, but the sport wasn’t ruined. Because of prosperity, Americans were destined to supply boxing’s audience, not its participants, soon, anyway. Not so with Mexico.
Boxing was not on Mexico’s public airwaves for most of the last decade because of the same shortsighted greed that afflicted, and afflicts, things here in the U.S. Mexican great Marco Antonio Barrera, in fact, cites the renewed availability of boxing in Mexican homes as a reason for his comeback: None of his countrymen saw his glory days. Unless you were a Mexican with a satellite dish or access to a sports bar that had one, then, you probably gave up on boxing sometime after 2001.
Ten years is a long time. Imagine a Mexican who turns 20 this year; he’s spent half his life without boxing. Now imagine that Mexican was to be the next Barrera. Whatever else he may be, he’s not the next Barrera anymore.
Today, we are told Saul Alvarez and Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. are among Mexico’s greatest young fighters. The troublesome thing is that it might be so. Expect just as many Mexican “greats” to be fed to us by promoters in the next decade as we had in the last, but don’t expect many actual great fighters out of Mexico for 10 years to come.
Oh, enough of the dreary prognostications already! Very well. Back to pay-per-view season.
The first episode of “24/7” was better than it could have been. There were the same old overwrought and overproduced elements, sure. Freddie Roach’s pursuit of anonymity in a mall – while accoutered in bright Team Pacquiao garb and followed by a camera crew – was the best example. But anyway.
The first episode dealt fairly with the issue of Margarito’s hand wraps. It reported the facts of the case; the discovery of the pads, the result of the California State Athletic Commission’s investigation, the revocation of Margarito’s license, and the restoration of Margarito’s license in Texas. Then it gave Margarito his chance to convince potential buyers “he didn’t know” – that he still “doesn’t know!” (not in subtitled translation) – anything was wrong with his wraps the night he faced Shane Mosley.
And then “24/7” went to Roach casually saying Margarito is lying before showing Pacquiao, in an uncommon bit of satire, pantomiming Margarito’s path to obliviousness – complete with covering his eyes with one hand while extending the other to an imaginary trainer. Yes, Margarito’s explanation remains, in the strictest sense of the word, unbelievable.
But he still won’t make much of a villain. He has a sleepy-eyed humility that makes him pretty hard to hate. He is not going to cut it as a Mexican hero, either, though; wherever they found those extras for the car-wash plot, Margarito now cuts things a little too fine, in both beard and palliation, to be a working-class hero.
But this is good as it gets right now. Take it or leave it.
Bart Barry can be reached at bbarry@15rounds.com. Additionally, his book, “The Legend of Muhammad Ali,” co-written with Thomas Hauser, can be purchased here.
Photo by Chris Farina/Top Rank
