Other sports like soccer, football even basketball has advanced with sports science and nutrition. You see track and field records get broken. Swimming as well. NFL combine you see more 300 lbs athletes run ridiculous 40s and you see more and more db, wr, rb etc run sub 4.3 40s. Strength sports you see a record broken every other week.
I don’t feel that with boxing. Too much cherry picking and underhanded tactics around. Even Canelo who I rate highly has pulled off shady shit like doping in the GGG rematch. Fucking tyson fury heavyweight champ at the time getting embarrassed by ngannou who has never boxed professionally mma champ or not. (Thank goodness for usyk showing what a real boxing champion looks like). Boxers like crawford, charlo, brooks, mikey garcia, constantly jumping up two weights for terrible fights that mostly turn into mismatches. Pacquiao at his age being fast tracked to a title shot with barrios which derailed the undisputed talks. Jake paul being ranked 14 at cruiserweiht after Chavez who never won at cruiser, Mike tyson who was damn near 60 with a myriad of health problems.
Then there is the fact that boxing in the Olympics is being removed due to too much corruption in AIBA. The talent pool in boxing was dire before its gonna be much worse. Most people don’t wanna be punched in the head so it shouldn’t be surprising that its dire. Sport ain’t gonna die but good lord its in a terrible state outside of the lower weights like Inoue weight and lower. Once that Riyad season honeymoon period goes away its gonna be long.
as a titbit boxing is the sport in my country that is the most notoriously mixed up with gang crime
Ireland? The kinnehans?
you got it lol
i had a feeling. Many fighters signed under MTK were banned from entering the US lmfao
Combat sports in general feel like they’re in a strange place. Like, boxing and MMA seem simultaneously bigger and more popular than they’ve been in a while (which I attribute to the various high-profile celebrity boxing matches as well as hard times generally creating interest in fighting), but the general quality is just the drizzling shits right now.
I’m way more of an MMA viewer than a boxing viewer, but it seems like various combat sports “promotions” don’t actually do a lot of promoting of their fights and fighters. I’ve thought this for a while now, but it’s so pronounced at this point. UFC’s Dana White clearly doesn’t give a fuck anymore, most fighters have been expected to get themselves out there with self-promotion for years now. I don’t understand why they aren’t pushing the hell out of people like Aspinall and Pantoja and especially Topuria.
As far as the future trajectory, I think it’s only going to get worse, especially in heavier weight classes where they have to compete with stick-and-ball sports for talent (the only way they could compete is by paying way more, and fuck no they won’t do that).
Most of the joy I derive from combat sports right now is going back and watching old stuff, learning about fighters I wasn’t around for, etc.
Good lord the quality is bad. Ufc took a page out of boxing’s playbook and makes up these goofy interim titles that hold up the fights. I cannot for the life of me understand why aspinall isn’t pushed. Hes the fastest MMA heavyweight since fedor and probably the most complete package since prime Cain. You’re right its gonna get worse in the heavyweights. A lot of these heavies seem like blown up lightheavy/middleweights. its bare bones over there. There aren’t many people that big to begin with so you can imagine. And there is even less people that size that are athletic. Heavyweight decline has been brutal and thats the marquee division.
it’s not just boxing, the ufc also picked up a lot of brainworms after conor mcgregor came along. it’s all superfights and champs ditching belts after one or none defenses, and they ditched their USADA program and its kind of widely accepted that PEDs are tacitly allowed if you keep up appearances and dont pop on the tests (there are arguments for PEDs in combat sports for recovery but the UFC is shady as hell). OTOH the org does fuck all to promote fighters bc they dont want another fighter with negotating power the way mcgregor had so theyre not actually pulling in big views. Not to mention things like jon jones’ sitting on the heavyweight title and refusing to fight tom aspinall. Everyone wants to be a pro wrestling heel but the only one who was ever good at it was chael sonnen. Luckily there are guys like Pantoja, aspinall, etc, who are keeping the brand alive despite the ufc’s best efforts. I haven’t kept up with the sport of mma much outside of the ufc for a while so maybe the grass is greener. it’s not all bad ofc but the brand is obnoxious and tacky, dana white is a clown, and I despise joe rogan. Whatever. Pride never die!
And the ngannou split once again bought up fighter unionisation. Couture went hard for fighter unionisation. There was too much brainworms for that to ever get going. Kiss ass company men chuds like Michael chandler will go out of their way to fuck it up You think a spot that parades trump around gives a shit with its lousy pay? Fighters in boxing will laugh at the deals dana blight will bring up. And you aren’t lying about the ufc as a brand good lord it is garbage. Almost every fighter is a manchild except the Dagestan guys and the heavyweights and hell… The way jon jones sat on the heavyweight title just to retire like that and hold up the division is disgraceful. Pereira was liked because he fought a ton and hell he may even move to heavyweight. To be honest he has the power and frame to do it although at heavyweight no one’s chin is safe from those 4oz gloves
I think all sports that require repeated concussions should be banned.
Must be bad if the IOC is calling them corrupt
I first knew it was dodgy when roy jones lost the Olympics final. That was the worst robbery I’ve ever seen in amateurs.
I feel like something your post is leaving out about boxing is how we fairly recently (last decade?) learned about CTE, how fucking scary it is, and how boxing puts you at a very high risk for it.
Long term I don’t really see how the sport survives in its current form
Boxing was actually safer when it was barr knuckle. The gloves just let people punch more.
This is true. When you had to worry about breaking your hand, you couldn’t transfer as much momentum into your opponent’s skull, which is what bruises the brain
brain damage has always been an obvious risk of boxing. the participants were usually under no illusion there. we used to call old boxers “punchy” and now we use a more scientific term.
it’s a poor man’s sport but the opportunities have dwindled as a result of promoter fragmentation, the lack of (free) televising, and rise of other safer or more popular sports. outside of the top few, you’re fighting for peanuts. so i reckon those who’d ever given it a shot have their sights elsewhere, even mma.
i miss the good-old days of well-matched world-class talent but we’ll never see it again. and that’s probably a good thing. my entertainment is not worth the hurt and exploitation.
OP forgot
Any full contact combat sport that allows blows to the head - the public knowledge that suffering a single knockout permanently damages the brain should’ve shut this shit down, or at least merited a total rethinking of how combat sports should work.
I just saw a headline the other day that said in soccer there’s “no safe amount” of heading the ball
From studies I’ve seen soccer, rugby, am football, hockey, wrestling, have the highest concussion rates in high school/ college sports
The Shaolin Monks had the right idea. A martial art you can keep doing until you’re elderly minimizing long term injuries.
I completely agree with you. If I had children I would firmly refuse to let them do boxing or tackle football. Unfortunately, overwhelming evidence of direct harm seems to not be enough for many people to ban these sports
American football is so wildly popular that I don’t think it’d ever get banned in the US. The silver lining is that rules changes are making CTE and head/neck injuries less common (the kinds of tackles and hits that were completely legal even 15 years ago are fucking wild to watch nowadays, straight up helmet-to-helmet contact at full sprint and everyone just shrugged and went back for the next play even as both players are wobbling like they’re drunk) to the point where all the other body-wrecking injuries will hit players first so they don’t have time to turn their brains to swiss cheese.
There were increase of kids dying in football practice due to heat as well. All that gear couldn’t have helped
Definitely not. Football also has a lot of coaches with brainworms about hydration being a reward for hard practice and is primarily played in southern climates, which is not a good combination. Throw in climate change and you get a shitshow.
The chuds blamed covid vaccines. I’m not joking. No really
I’m glad they are at least doing something, my guess is in the long term we will still see a lot of the same problems
I’m in the same boat as you and I believe this way of thinking will only become more popular until schools simply don’t have enough players for a(n) (american) football team. Lots of kids with working class parents pretty much have to get involved in an after school activity but men’s soccer is typically the same season as football and the equipment cost is much lower….
Added to the list of reasons to pray for the fall of burgerlandia
Get those kids into POWER SLAP instead. The fact that this “sport” was allowed to exist at all…actually shameful. And I’m a combat sport enjoyer!
forgot about that shit. such a gross venture and the fact it was advertised so heavily on the UFC’s youtube channel pisses me off so much.
That’s just par for the course for Dana & the UFC though. Wish (popular) MMA didn’t have to deal with his stink on everything but here we are
Shit I did it all. Boxing, mma, rugby, even in soccer heading CTE is a risk. Now I have a fuckton of health issues. That and military. For combat sport a lot of the damage is done in sparring. A lot of old school sparring wars we did were more brutal than the matches.
Just another way to keep the working poor down…
It has a fucked up history. It was very popularly practiced back then by aristocrats but it grew in prominence among the working class and the aristocrats realized they wanted no smoke in it.
Thankfully we have invented the perfect ‘sport’ for the aristocracy: golf!
Yeah and the in ring deaths we’ve seen. They seen IV rehydration removed and that made things riskier. The way dadashev died was brutal. They reduced the rounds from those hundreds of rounds to 15 back then. Then from 15 to 12. It doesn’t matter the human body is not meant to take shots to the head
I think the presence of carnies like Dana White, Rogan and the other man-o-sphere types combining politics with combat sports as a way to appeal to a fragile demographic is setting an example for any combat sport, entertainment wrestling as well.
You always see Kadyrov sportswashing things by hanging with many fighters. He has an… Odd thing with combat sports
