Brick City Boxing

By: Tim Crowley

Boxing writer Tim Crowley covered Affliction Banned ringside, for Brickcityboxing.com and contrasts that huge event with Boxing's best.

With the rise in popularity of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) in the United States, many have speculated whether MMA contests like UFC and Affliction Banned

will soon overtake boxing as the premier combat sport. The debate is enhanced by comparing the Margarito/Cotto fight vs. the Affliction Banned card, held three weeks ago.

Each was arguably the biggest event of the year for their respective sports. Margarito/Cotto was a pitting of the two best welterweights in the world, with each having proved themselves by winning against the best opposition the sport had to offer.

And for Affliction Banned, it was a sort of re-packaging of some of the sports top talent who may have been previously overlooked by mainstream media—fighters like Vitor Belfort and Antonio Rogerio Noguiera—while also attempting to establish dominant superstars in Andrei Arlovski and Fedor Emelianenko.

There is a marked difference in how each was marketed. The Cotto/Margarito match was given third-tier marketing and buildup. An HBO Countdown was done, but not a 24/7, and it was nowhere near as hyped as the De La Hoya/Mayweather fight, which was supposed to “save” boxing and bring it back to mainstream audiences.

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Affliction Banned was billed as one of the grandest MMA events in the sport’s history, with over 200 media passes given out to American and international journalists, and with the public support of a major clothing line and a Donald Trump himself.

The quality of product, however, is out of synch with the coverage.

Boxing has about 100 years of cultivation behind it. For the past 100 years, a sizeable number of men from around the world have devoted their lives to the sport as a profession—as way of earning a living. MMA athletes have only been able to live off their bouts for approximately the past 25 years.

In 1921, American heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey fought the French Georges Carpentier, and brought in a million dollars at the gate. This was a fortune in those days, and it was the first time fighters saw another earning such money for prizefighting.

Since then, generation after generation of men from around the world, devoted their young lives to becoming champions, and those that didn’t make it would later train young fighters to become champions themselves.

The collective wisdom amassed by these fighters and passed onto younger generations has continually raised the competition and level of the sport, decade after decade. The peak of this was seen in the 1980’s, but since then the business aspects of boxing have narrowed its viewership and ultimately lowered the overall money making potential of the sport.

But boxing has survived, and fighters are still learning from this same collected wisdom and are adding their own stamp on the sports history. Margarito and Cotto did that last week.

The fight was an exceptional display of boxing skill and human courage that typifies the sport at its best. And when compared with other recent matches of such caliber, matches like Vazquez/Marquez or Pavlik/Taylor, it becomes apparent that the sport has retained a stylistic beauty that was initially shown through fighters like Joe Louis, Ali, Ray Leonard, and Duran. The sport has rightfully earned the moniker, “The Sweet Science.”

MMA is a much newer and rough around the edges.

Having it’s history as a cross between no-holds barred fighting, wrestling, and boxing, MMA has existed for just as long as boxing, (if not longer), but in small circles, often in families like the Gracies. The sport has not had the world-wide notoriety that boxing has had, and up until recently, it did not offer the monetary compensation to allow large numbers of fighters to pursue it full-time.

The result is that MMA today is not as aesthetically evolved as boxing. This is not to say that it will never be, just that it isn’t at this time. It actually could be compared to boxing in the 1900s and early 1920’s. A quick glimpse of footage from this era will show that the fighters had nowhere near the amount of angles to their punches, and did not have the graceful foot mobility and crafty defense of today’s elite fighters. Fighters would often appear to be waiting turns to exchange bludgeoning haymakers.

MMA is in a similar place today. Evidence of this can be seen in the lack of a dominant champion. In MMA, fighters have to master techniques in a number of dimensions, and even the most dominant fighters are usually weak in a certain aspect, either striking or grappling. Very strong and experienced fighters can be vanquished by lesser opponents merely because that opponent is very strong in a single dimension, and was able to force that dimension in the fight, like a ground game.

This is changing with fighters like Fedor, who is the closest thing MMA has right now to a dominant champion—an Ali or Jack Johnson. And his style is one of the more exciting, blending a nice balance of striking and ground submissions.

It will remain to be seen however, if an MMA fight can deliver the sustained drama of a boxing match. MMA brings excitement in peaks, with unbelievable displays of athleticism that end fights quickly with brutal knockouts or by body-bending submissions.

Long battles are often fought on the ground, where it is harder to see the drama on the fighter’s faces, and the fighters themselves are immobilized so the action does not have the same effect as boxers trading post to post.

But the growing popularity of MMA will only continue to elevate the competition level, and thus raise the entertainment value of the fights themselves. And MMA is getting the support it needs to thrive.

It’s a testament to boxing that it has survived under such difficult conditions. Elite-level boxing is entirely absent from regular cable television, and fans are forced to pay high Pay Per View fees for fights that are mostly hype, like De La Hoya/Mayweather.

It seems like MMA promoters believe in the quality of their product, while boxing promoters have lost faith in theirs.