Boxing New Year's resolution

Boxing New Year's resolution
By Michael Carpenter Harris, Doghouse Boxing (Jan 11, 2013)
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Boxing New Year's resolution
As a boxing fan, I get pretty bored with sports around the holidays. While my family cheers and buzzes about all the great football match ups and gather around the television to watch during Christmas and New Year’s, I find myself as a boxing fan totally unsatisfied. Truthfully I stopped really following football and basketball, the two biggest sports in this country, when I was still a young amateur fighter. I used to love those sports just like all the other average guys, but more and more boxing consumed me to the point that I only keep up with other sports just for the sake of social awareness when I’m with a group of guys.

The absence of boxing around the holidays is a gap in the boxing schedule that I think is a missed opportunity to grow the sport for everyone involved. Boxing people have resigned themselves to the fact that there will be no boxing on or around the major holidays such as Christmas, New Years, and Thanksgiving and we just accept it and don’t say much. Admittedly, most of those boxing fans are also fans of football and basketball and probably get their fix of athletic competition through those other outlets, but a boxing junkie, on the other hand doesn’t have that option. The boxing junkie is relegated to watching all the fights throughout the previous year that he (or she, there are some female boxing junkies) already has on DVD and watched a million times. I am so bad sometimes that I will watch a movie with my family on one tv screen and on the screen beside it I’ll play the latest fight on mute. So, here I am during the holidays with my family, some of them former amateur boxers themselves, gathered around the television watching football and basketball and no one thinking about boxing but poor little me. Then I think to myself, I know my family well enough that if there was a good boxing match on, that we would be watching it.

I suffer through whistles, personal fouls, half times, time-outs, and goofy mascots knowing that the sport I love could be doing much better. I wonder what enterprising promoter or fighter will recognize the tremendous opportunity that they have to showcase their fighters or showcase themselves at a critical point in the year where everyone is with family, everyone is relaxing, and everyone is gathered around the television in search of holiday entertainment with their family. What ambitious fighter is willing to hit the gym during holiday season and train hard in order to be ready to be showcased in front of such a unique audience? What promoter will have the foresight to see how profitable it would be to put on a boxing card on December 28, while many people are still vacationing between Christmas and New Years and would love to go see a live fight. With the return of boxing to network television, it would raise the profile of boxers and boxing considerably to have them seen on television along with the other holiday sports. The holiday sports crowd will have a new sport to get excited about seeing during the holidays, the sport will generate revenue, attract new viewers, and give boxing a chance to get in on some of the big financial business that the holidays are so famous for. This is my holiday wish for 2013 and now all I need is Chris Cringle’s mailing address.  


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