Boxing and MMA - What a Ride
 By Anthony Santiago (Jan 29, 2008) Doghouse Boxing
The sport of boxing is like an age long rollercoaster. With a bunch of twists and turns coming at you so fast, you don't always know what's going on. Great fighters like Johnson, Ali, Fraizer, Robinson, Langford, Dempsey, Tunney and others ruled the golden years of boxing. When some fighters retire, there always aren't top rank replacements to fill those slots. So the sport dulls a bit. You can't control change, but you can hope. Boxing has always been a sport loved by the fans, who appreciated two guys climbing into the ring to risk life and limb to knock the other guy sensless. But like the rollercoaster it is, the ride
lately seems to be heading straight down.
Some would say boxing is a dead sport. To me, it's in a coma and is slowly coming out. Sure the heavyweight division isn't once what it was, but that's not the only division in the sport. With this box-off tournament for Wladimir Klitschko's IBF Heavyweight Championship, that should bring back some excitement to the big boy division. But the other divisions don't get looked at as much. The welterweights now a day are amazing and the entire weight class has a ton of potential. With fighters moving up, supermiddleweight also looks promising. Not exactly saying that boxing is the sport it once was because of the certain things that are happening, but boxing today looks good for the future.
Mixed martial arts has become a hurricane and is looking to destroy everything in it's path to become popular. Debates between which is the better sport sparks all the time and you can't help but think how the breakthrough of MMA has effected boxing. What about MMA is there to dislike? It takes wrestling, some brazilian jiu-jitsu, a pinch of boxing, a little karate, and other fighting techniques. Not to mention blood, sweat, tears, and scarifice. Take all that roll it up, and you've got a nice helping of MMA. Even though the amazing sport of boxing is the art of hitting your opponent and not getting
hit, some fans would rather watch two guys roll around in a cage choking, kicking, and slamming one another.
Boxing has been threatened to be taken over by the rising popularity of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, and with their recent purchase of Japan's incredible PRIDE Fighting Championships, the UFC only gets better as their roster piles up with the best competition from around the world. As that happens, boxing has been seeing young rising stars like Alexander Povetkin, Edwin Valero, and the returns of legends in Felix Trinidad and Roy Jones. Who knows where the sports of boxing and mixed martial arts will go? They both are changing constantly, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. That's just the way it is. Where both sports will be in the future, we don't know, but with the rising popularity in both sports and new comers coming from all over, were sure in for one hell of a ride.
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