re: What happened to boxing.

One of boxing's biggest issues will always be the fractured nature of its governing bodies and promotors. With leagues like the NFL, NBA, MLB, PGA Tour, the UFC portion of MMA, you largely have promotion and governance under a single roof. By doing that, you can guarantee that the top athletes in a sport will usually compete with one another and there will be consistent and unified promotion behind a particular event.

With boxing, it's totally different. First, you have multiple boxing governance organizations (WBO, WBC, WBA, and IBF) competing with one another and requiring different things of each of its particular champions. At the same time, you have multiple promotors often fighting with one another for their cut as well such as Top Rank, Golden Boy, Matchroom, etc.

All of these things lead to fractured TV rights where a fan really doesn't know when and where they can see a particular fight unless they truly follow the sport. For example, a fighter could fight on an Amazon or Netflix undercard and then six months later, his next fight is on DAZN. Almost all of your fights nowadays require some sort of streaming subscription to watch if not a PPV purchase. Gone are the days of Friday Night Fights on ESPN where you could see up and coming fighters and the occasional title fight or HBO and Showtime Boxing having good fight cards on a subscription service that a wider segment of society pays to have. Through all of this, boxing has ended up being a sport that is hard to follow casually. Instead, you mostly have your diehard fans following.

Further frustrating this problem is really the lack of any super marketable stars in the American market. For example, Terrence Crawford could arguably be considered one of the boxing GOATs. However, the average sports fan has no clue who he is.

All of these things just contribute to a sport that can seem like it's sucking wind or dying at times.

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Also boxing matches turned into a couple punches then a bear hug.

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Agree.

I stumbled on Team Boxing League (TBL) recently, which was somewhat refreshing in that regard. The format of a team (like Houston v NYC), each team having something like 10 boxers (give or take), and each boxer getting one round to fight, minimized clinching. When fighters get one round or maybe two (some of the better fighters got a second "money round" later in the contest), it eliminates slow "feeling your opponent out" early rounds and poorly conditioned fighters excessively hanging on to slow the action.

It kind of misses in some ways... I didn't know any of the fighters and wasn't really invested in the teams, so wasn't really rooting for anyone. You also don't get the building drama of an Ali / Frazier war for 15 rounds that pulls you in the longer it goes. And some of the fighters were very amateur, so a few rounds were duds. Still, it was kind of cool to see everyone stepping into the ring with a sense of urgency.

I don't see this style overtaking traditional marquee matchups of individual stars, but I did find it watchable.

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Boxing is to UFC, as soccer is to Football

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Soccer is still the biggest sport in the world by a pretty huge majority.

It was never big in the U.S.

There isn't a simple answer to a complex question.

The biggest problem is that PPVs happened. Also, America's prime athletes gravitated to the stick and ball sports. The advent of robust amateur leagues for the stick and ball sports got athletes out o0f gyms in the other sports "off months" so the pipeline of younger talent took a hit.

There's also the issue of the best not fighting the best. In US boxing's hayday 1980s-2000s you didn't have to beg the best to fight the best. They were lining up to fight each other.

Corrupt sanctioning bodies haven't helped but they were corrupt back then too.

I'm a massive boxing fan and do not think that MMA had a lot to do with boxing's decline at all. They are different sports with different fan bases.

But boxing is far from dead as many would like to claim.

Inoue/Nakatani just filled a 55K seat stadium and US fans were up at daylight to watch the fight.

Haney/Garcia II will fill up any arena it's staged in.

Benavidez/Canelo or Benavidez/Bivol will do huge numbers

As a previous posted mentioned, boxing being on free TV again would go a long way to building it back up because fans could watch fighters grow and become more invested.

Also, fighters today seem to lack charisma. Suger Ray, Hearns, RJJ, Ali, Foreman, and ODH were household names with huge endorsement deals. Even casuals knew who they were.

There are very few (especially US) fighters with marketable charisma and appeal. Garcia has it but he needs to not act like a wack job half of the time.

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For me corruption.

Around 2003.

HBO bout. Larry Merchant and George Foreman announcing.

Heavyweight. BOTH fighters managed by Don King. In the fight, one guy beat the absolute crap out of the other guy. It was not close. One guy looked like he had worked out at the gym, the other guy looked like he was on the way to the hospital.

Split decision for the dead man walking. George and Larry were stunned. George said "that was the best fight money could buy."

I saw plenty of fights over the years where I thought the judges were bought but they were close fights. This fight was not.

I went from paying for all heavyweight events to nothing. Zero. I don't watch wrestling. I was done watching rigged boxing. Not a single boxing match watched since 2003.

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Certainly one reason. In recent memory the first GGG vs Canelo fight was very very obvious too.

I think it could have withstood some corruption if the stars of boxing hadn't started dodging big fights to keep an undefeated record. Most of the big names got like Mayweather an nitpicked their fights so you rarely had two of the top of the class fighting each other.

Add to the fact they have waaaaaaaaay too many belts and weight classes. It makes it hard for the general public to even know who the best fighter is in their given weight class with so many belts out there. Just a ridiculous number of weight classes,

Many good reasons listed. Another problem is too many belts. If there was one champion at a weight class it would be much more interesting than 10 champions per weight class.

Do not agree with this at all. Do we need 5 belts? Certainly not but there's plenty of evidence that the sanctioning bodies (Zuffa will be no different) let those they want fight for titles.

Y'all watch. After the Wardley/Dubois fight, one of the bodies (probably the IBF) will strip Usyk and award that belt to the winner of the Wardley/Dubois fight. Or they'll make the winner mandatory for Usyk and if Usyk chooses to fight someone else (he's already beaten Dubois TWICE) they'll take the belt away.

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Headbutts drove him insane in the Holyfield fight

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This. Holyfield was known throughout his boxing career as a guy who would headbutt opponents on the inside. Here’s what Holyfield’s repeated headbutting did to Haseem Rahman when they fought

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Deuk Koo Kim.

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thus the old joke "KIM DUK"

sad story nonetheless