The radio station at Hoboken will be connected by direct wire to the ringside at Jersey City, and as the fight progresses, each blow struck and each incident, round by round, will be described by voice, and the spoken words will go hurtling through the air to be instantaneously received in the theaters, halls and auditoriums scattered over cities within an area of more than 125,000 square miles.
Little did Dempsey know that broadcasting would change boxing forever. Six years later, when he fought Gene Tunney for the second time, the bout was heard as far afield as South America and Australia. Tunney became the first boxer to make a million dollars for a single fight. To put that amount of money in context, in the same year, the season in which he hit his record sixty home runs, Babe Ruth was paid just $70,000.
When the depression hit, it swelled the ranks of boxers at the same time as severely cutting down the prizes they were fighting for. But it was also a period when broadcast technology matured. Like Sullivan before him, Joe Louis was a bridge between two periods: the radio era and that of television. All Louis’ major fights were broadcast on the radio, which by the mid-1930s had entered American homes. An estimated seventy million people tuned in to hear his 1938 knockout of Nazi Germany’s Max Schmeling. Boddy notes that virtually every major American autobiography that covers the period, from Jimmy Carter’s Why Not the Best? to Miles Davis’ Miles, features a scene in which the author listens to a Louis fight. ‘We’d be all crowded around the radio waiting to hear the announcer describe Joe knocking some motherfucker out,’ wrote Davis, discussing Louis’ symbolic status.
As with film, boxing was perfect for the static TV cameras of the day, plus there were built-in breaks for selling beer and razor blades. By the mid-1950s, Americans could watch fights on network television up to six nights a week. Louis’ 1946 rematch with Billy Conn was the first televised heavyweight title fight, though the technology was still in its infancy. Five years later, Louis’ loss to Rocky Marciano was perfectly timed for the arrival of TV sets in homes. The event was seen as so crucial for the burgeoning industry that a consortium of television manufacturers clubbed together with Gillette, a major advertiser, to purchase the rights to a free-to-air broadcast for more than $100,000. It’s estimated that more than eighty per cent of America’s thirty million television sets tuned in to watch Louis’ sad farewell.
For the biggest fights, closed-circuit television provided another possible income source. A forerunner of today’s pay-per-view broadcast model, closed-circuit transmitted footage to cinemas full of ticketholders via specially built telephone lines. In the early 1950s, home television and closed-circuit engaged in a now largely forgotten format war. This was all to the benefit of the boxing industry, which profited as rival syndicates bid against each other to secure fights. It was also good for radio, which survived as an alternative for boxing fans who didn’t want to pay for theatre entry. The audio broadcast of Marciano’s 1955 victory over Archie Moore was estimated to have reached 250 million people around the world. At roughly ten per cent of the global population that was surely an inflated figure—but still, it was indicative of radio’s continuing relevance.
Closed-circuit eventually proved to be a much better economic proposition for boxers, and by the mid-1950s the closed-circuit theatre system could seat half a million patrons across the United States and Canada. In 1971, Ali’s first fight with Frazier (another fight of the century, for those playing at home) drew most of its record $30 million in takings from a global closed-circuit audience of 300 million.
Pay-per-view is essentially a technological update on closed-circuit, allowing viewers to pay for fights without leaving the house, thereby expanding the potential worldwide audience into the tens of millions. Though early forms of the system were used in the 1960s, pay-per-view came into its own from the late 1970s and early ’80s, paralleling the introduction of subscription cable in the United States. These two developments would eventually have a number of unintended consequences for the sport as a whole, but before we go into that it’s worth looking at one final source of filthy lucre: the site fee.
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It’s likely that as long as crowds have gathered to watch people hit each other, savvy operators have gone out of their way to make sure it happens on their patch of dirt (or riverboat casino in the middle of the Mississippi, as was sometimes the case in the nineteenth century).
Sometimes hosts simply want the prestige of hosting a prize fight; most of the time they see it as an opportunity to make money through gambling, tourism, ticket sales, miscellaneous commerce or some combination of the above. Accordingly, many are willing to pay up front for the privilege. Today this is known as a site fee.
As in much else to do with the commercial side of boxing, George Lewis ‘Tex’ Rickard set the standard for bringing fights to out-of-the-way locations. With his shrewd porcine eyes, comb-over and laconic drawl, Rickard was to the first quarter of the twentieth century what Don King was to the last.
Like Jack Dempsey, with whom he would eventually make several fortunes, Rickard was a product of the dying days of the old west. And as with much else to do with boxing promotion, it’s difficult to tell fact from fiction when it comes to his early life. Certainly his claim that he was born in a Missouri cabin while a gunfight between a posse of local deputies and Jesse James took place next door seems a little too good to be true.
What’s confirmed is that after a Tom Sawyer-ish childhood in Texas and a brief stint as the sheriff of Henrietta, Rickard headed north to Alaska and the Yukon Territory during the Klondike gold rush. He befriended Wyatt Earp, made a pile, opened a saloon and casino and lost said pile in said casino. The experience taught him a thing or two about ‘smokers’—fights held in the back rooms of bars—and when he decided to start over with a new town and a new gold rush, boxing was front of mind.
As a prominent local businessman and the owner of the Northern Saloon and Casino, Rickard decided that the way to draw the nation’s attention to the small, optimistically named town of Goldfield, Nevada was to stage a major boxing match there. Rickard didn’t do anything by halves. He raised $30,000, the equivalent of three-quarters of a million today, to lure the lightweight champion, Joe Gans, and a top contender, Denmark’s Battling Nelson, to Goldfield in 1906.
The bout, which was billed as—you guessed it—‘the fight of the century’, was racially charged from the outset. Gans, an African-American, was subject to shocking abuse from Nelson’s camp in the lead-up to the bout. Rickard, meanwhile, concentrated on squeezing every ounce of publicity from the event as photographers and journalists arrived from around the country. He arranged for the $30,000 to be displayed in the form of 1,500 gold pieces in the window of the local bank. He posed for photos at his house, noteworthy for its electric lights and for being the only brick building in town. He claimed hundreds of tickets had been sold to ‘what you might call “ladies of fortune”,’ and that a special train might have to be arranged to bring them to town. The day of the fight, two hundred such specially chartered Pullman cars arrived at Goldfield’s newly constructed railway station, but there was no sign of the ladies of fortune. The town flooded with miners, gamblers and fight fans. There were lines out the door of saloons to get to the card tables. The temporary 7,900-seat green lumber arena Rickard had built couldn’t hold everyone who wanted to see the fight.
With Jack London and President Theodore Roosevelt’s son Kermit in attendance at ringside and the temperature topping thirty-five degrees, Gans stoically absorbed forty-two rounds of gouging, butting and the occasional punch from Nelson before the ‘Durable Dane’ hit him with a low blow so flagrant the referee was forced to end the fight. ‘Mammy, your boy is bringing home the bacon with lots of gravy on it,’ Gans telegrammed his mother, popularising the phrase.
Goldfield’s experience became a blueprint other towns and countries would try to follow. In the months after the event, the local real estate market boomed, the town’s population increased and depos
its flooded in to Goldfield’s banks. Despite claiming that the promotion was designed solely to benefit Goldfield, Rickard, too, brought home the bacon, making more than $13,000 in profit. He was the genius behind Dempsey’s 1921 million-dollar gate (which took place in an upgraded version of the wooden arena he first used in Goldfield) and ended up as the chief promoter at Madison Square Garden.
In the century since, many optimistic towns and far-flung countries have tried to replicate the Goldfield experience and put themselves on the map with a boxing match. Sometimes these arrangements are successful, but they’re rarely wholesome. Archie Moore palled around with Argentina’s Juan Peron during the 1950s, while the ’70s brought a run of prominent heavyweight title fights in exotic dictatorships, financed largely via the pillaging of the local populace. The most famous examples, the Rumble in the Jungle and the Thrilla in Manila, were nothing but elaborate public-relations exercises designed to legitimise the murderous regimes of Mobutu Sese Seko and Ferdinand Marcos.
These days, it’s not unheard of for governments to pony up some money to host big fights—the state of Queensland chipped in for Horn vs Pacquiao, for example—but site fees are most often paid by American casinos. They may hope that some of boxing’s sinister mystique rubs off, but the main reason they pay is to attract high-rolling gamblers, proving once again that there’s very little new under the sun when it comes to prize fighting. Consequently, more and more American fights have been moved away from big cities to purpose-built arenas in Las Vegas, Atlantic City and more obscure locations on Indian reservations.
These bouts often take place in near-empty halls, far from the metropolitan audiences that might support local fighters, or be built up into regular fight-going crowds. At their worst, site fees and the sale of television rights remove the incentive for promoters to actually promote fights. They know they’re guaranteed to turn a profit whether or not anyone turns up.
Site fees are far from the only perverse financial constructs in the boxing economy. For a long time the business model behind elite prize fighting was the biggest moneymaking juggernaut in the history of competitive sport. But boxing has been a victim of its own success: the rivers of gold brought in by the sale of tickets, broadcast rights and pay-per-views made the sport so lucrative that everyone felt they could afford to ignore its long-term best interests. It doesn’t help that professional boxing has no governing body and everybody is constantly trying to screw everybody else out of a buck, but perhaps a sense of mutual interest would be easier to foster if there weren’t quite as many bucks to screw people out of.
Ironically, the process started in earnest in the 1950s, when the sport was at the peak of its popularity. For those at the top, the windfall from closed-circuit was enormous. Even those in the tier below, fighting on nationally televised cards, were able to make more money than ever before from fewer fights. But the introduction of television and the explosion of interest in boxing had the effect of destroying takings at the gate. This was especially true for the smoky neighbourhood clubs and suburban stadiums where non-elite and up-and-coming boxers used to ply their trade in front of modest but devoted audiences. Almost all were forced to close. People simply preferred to watch boxing from the comfort of their own couches.
A. J. Liebling described the problem like this: ‘Boxers are in the same position as the hand-loom weavers of Britain when Dr Edmund Cartwright introduced the power loom. Two boxers on a national hook-up with fifty major city outlets can fill the place of a hundred boxers on top ten years ago, and for every two eliminated from on top, at least ten lose their work underneath.’
Insiders were soon talking about a crisis at the grassroots level of the fight game, and of young boxers being rushed into high-profile matches on television before they were ready. The flip side to this was an explosion of the boxing audience that could only be sustained as long as it remained a regular fixture on free-to-air television—which it didn’t. Alternative programming and changing cultural mores, along with the deaths of Benny Paret and Davey Moore in televised bouts during the early 1960s, saw US TV networks begin to draw down their coverage. From the ’70s, subscription cable began to gobble up the rights to high-level boxing, a process that later repeated itself in Australia and the UK, leaving boxing on fewer screens than ever before.
At the same time, closed-circuit and then pay-per-view (with a relentlessly inf lating price tag) created a paywall that ensured only those already interested and willing to pay got to see marquee fighters plying their trade. For managers, promoters and fighters, the numbers were impossible to ignore, while TV execs liked how pay-per-view let them meet boxers’ pay expectations with little risk of ending up out of pocket. Even a modest audience of twenty-five thousand—an unheard-of disaster in normal television terms—paying thirty dollars each will generate gross revenue of $750,000.
In Australia, the case of Anthony Mundine is instructive. Mundine used to boast that every one of his fights was on pay-per-view, as if this were proof of his stardom. In fact, it was only proof of the vicious circle of shrinking boxing audiences. Mundine, the son of 1970s middleweight contender Tony Mundine, piggybacked off his earlier fame in rugby league and used a controversialist Muhammad Ali-lite schtick to convince the Australian public that he was more relevant in the boxing world than he really was. In fact, he was a contender at middleweight and super middleweight, but not much more than that.
After an ambitious early career, which featured a knockout loss in Europe at the hands of feather-fisted German titleholder Sven Ottke and a brave challenge to another dangerous Dane, Mikkel Kessler, Mundine followed the grand old Australian boxing tradition of staying home, fighting limited opposition. Yes, there were big domestic fights against Danny Green and Daniel Geale, which attracted enough interest to justify charging people to watch, but for the most part Mundine boxed international jobbers like Rashid Matumla and Alejandro Gustavo Falliga—men who aren’t household names even in their own households.
The formula was simple: in the lead-up to the bout the opponent’s credentials and chances would be inflated by a pliant media, while Mundine would trot out some tired, semi-offensive statement to drum up outrage and ramp up coverage. The gullible would be persuaded to purchase the pay-per-view in the hope of seeing ‘The Man’ lose, only to be left disappointed and broke when they found that the Terror from Tanzania was really more of a turkey.
It’s immediately apparent why this was bad for boxing in the long term; only the most incurable fight fan would continue to spend their money on such a disappointing product, and every casual fan who spends their hard-earned cash after being seduced by the hype is less likely to do so the next time. The numbers are not publicly available, but I would be willing to bet that outside of the aforementioned high-profile clashes, sales of Mundine pay-per-views saw a steady decline over the course of his career. I doubt it mattered much to Mundine; even his least profitable fights would have been tidy earners, and overall he has pocketed millions.
But that’s chump change compared to the astronomical amounts that are made from the highest profile international bouts. The sums involved in the biggest fight of all time, Floyd Mayweather’s 2015 victory over Manny Pacquiao, make your eyes water like a punch on the nose. More than four and a half million people paid $99 to watch the broadcast via pay-per-view, generating more than $400 million, while the sale of the international broadcast rights raised a further $40 million. Tickets to see the fight live at the 16,700-seat MGM Grand Arena cost an average $4,500, for a total gate of more than $70 million, and sponsors who wanted their logos on the ring apron paid a total of $13.2 million for the privilege.
Even leaving aside Pacquiao’s personal endorsement deals (Mayweather had none; no major company would touch him after he was convicted of domestic violence), merchandise sales and the f low-on effects for the Las Vegas economy, the bout generated more income in forty-seven minutes than many Pacific island nations do in a year. Needless to say, it was billed as th
e fight of the century—though to be fair it was a new century.
Few fighters see a fraction of the kind of money Mayweather and Pacquiao made. Only a handful of active fighters can regularly command million-dollar paydays—and the drop-off is precipitous. One boxer fighting on the undercard of Mayweather’s 2017 clash with MMA star Conor McGregor, the second biggest pay-per-view in history, was paid just $3,500. Even this would be a good payday for most pros, many of whom make little more than their predecessors in the 1950s.
Thankfully, and much to the joy of long-suffering fans, the sport’s powers that be seem to have realised that the market can only sustain so many pay-per-view events per year. And just as it was with radio, movies and TV, boxing is at the forefront of the next great change in media technology: streaming. With the US broadcast rights for most major sports locked up by TV networks until the 2020s, new streaming platforms—backed by traditional networks, major promoters and in one case a Ukrainian oligarch—are ploughing huge amounts of money into boxing, which, despite being dysfunctional, is at least available.
In the short term, streaming has further divided an already fractured marketplace, so that to follow boxing a fan must now subscribe to several apps and channels. Meanwhile, networks and promoters have already formed de facto leagues, so that fighters aligned with different networks rarely face each other.
On the other hand, competition between streaming platforms and TV networks has driven up fighter paycheques and that can hardly be a bad thing. In late 2018 streaming service DAZN signed middleweight champion Saul ‘Canelo’ Alvarez, the chiselled Mexican redhead widely regarded as the sport’s biggest star, to an astonishing five-year, eleven-fight, $365 million deal. Who knows if such largesse can be maintained in the long term, but boxers should enjoy it while it lasts.
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