Round by Round: Weekly Boxing Notes

For Those Who Shun the March Wackness
I realize that I’m in a distinct minority on this one, but I really hate March Madness. All these weekend warriors with their stupidass brackets pretending that they know or care about college basketball talking about Valpo or UTEP or whoever the hell it is this year -- it’s like the New Year’s Eve of the sports landscape, amateur night in the extreme, only this amateur night lasts a whole freakin’ month, an endless frat party of office culture and rah-rah crap. So yes, I am a March Madness Scrooge of the grinchiest order, and I’ve always thought, based on the evidence, that there were very few of my brethren floating around out there in Sportsland. Evidently, however, ESPN is banking on the fact that there are more than just a few of us, and also banking on the fact that March Madness Hating goes right alongside Sweet Science Loving.

Tomorrow night, ESPN is taking a chance on pitting heavyweight boxing against The Madness by airing the Vitali Klitschko/Juan Carlos Gomez heavyweight title fight from Stuttgart, Germany live at 6 p.m. EST on ESPN Classic. Originally, they were planning to run the fight on ESPN proper at 5 p.m., but a scheduling issue in Germany forced the fight back to 6 p.m., and thus onto Classic.

Will this gambit work? Who knows. I imagine it will depend on what their idea of success is. Vitali Klitschko has only a marginal profile here in the States, although some casual fans probably still remember him from his bloody war with Lennox Lewis in 2003. Juan Carlos Gomez is a fighter that sweet scientists know well and casual fans have never heard of. A Cuban defector, Gomez was a dazzling world champion at cruiserweight in the late 90’s, but failed in his bid to Evander Holyfield himself up to heavyweight, getting knocked out in one round in his heavyweight debut by Yanqui Diaz back in 2004.

Since then, he has toiled away on the C (or D) list, working his way back to becoming the WBC’s mandatory opponent for Vitali, who won the WBC strap last October by completely dominating the barely present Sam Peter.

Gomez can box a little bit, and he should at least prove more of a challenge to Klitschko than Peter did. The smart money is on Klitschko -- current odds have him close to a 7-1 fave -- but I’m looking for Gomez to win a few rounds early and push the 37-year-old Vitali past ten rounds.

Then again, I admit that I’m rooting for a Klitschko victory, because I don’t think Gomez staging an upset here does anything for the sport, and I see some potentially exciting fights for Vitali in the near future. More than anything, though, I’m rooting for Classic to pull a respectable rating on this fight tomorrow, enough so that ESPN starts thinking about getting back into the live-fight business on weekends as potential counter-programming in the future. To my mind, merely the fact that they’re spending money to show Klitschko/Gomez tomorrow against prime March Madness competition tells me that they see some real potential in the boxing marketplace. One thing you can say about the fight community -- it’s small, but it’s intensely loyal to the sport.

The Boxing/MMA Card That Interests Fans of Neither
Roy Jones, once the glorious pound-for-pound king of boxing, can do nothing right these days. If the guy had any shame whatsoever, he would have hung up the gloves after his embarrassing loss to Joe Calzaghe last November, a high-profile fight he shouldn’t have gotten in the first place but that still managed to warrant the 24/7 pay-per-view treatment from HBO as the network traded on the name value of the once-electrifying Jones.

Aware that his name is coming to mean less and less in the marketplace, Jones is headlining a PPV card tomorrow night in his hometown of Pensacola, Fla., that will attempt a gimmick angle to try and get some people to fork over their hard-earned money in a down economy. That gimmick is -- gasp! -- to mix MMA bouts with boxing matches on the same card.

Now in the great boxing vs. MMA debate, it’s always been my position that there really is no debate at all. Fans have their innate preferences, and though they are both fight sports, the rules and requirements of each are so different that arguing over which is better is like arguing over whether baseball is better than cricket. There’s no answer to that kind of debate -- you either like one or you like the other or you like both. End of story.

That said, putting boxing matches and MMA bouts on the same card certainly would be a big-time moneymaker if you had fights that fans of either sport gave a crap about. Similarly, if you staged a Chris Rock concert followed by a Lakers/Cavs game, you would sell out just about any arena in America.

But Roy Jones vs. Omar Sheika (Jones is 3-4 since 2004, while Sheika is 4-6 in his last ten fights) headlining a card that also includes utterly meaningless MMA contests (with Bobby Lashley vs. Jason Guida the most notable entry) is not exactly Chris Rock and then Kobe and LeBron territory. It’s more like Tom Arnold and then a Washington Generals intra-squad scrimmage. Something tells me that Integrated Sports, the company distributing the Jones/Sheika PPV, will inflate their numbers to save face, but I’m guessing it struggles to do 50,000 buys. One wonders if there’s a future for this type of cross-pollination, and I think there may be, but this card should not be considered any kind of litmus test for the enterprise, because as any promoter will tell you, the sports don’t sell the tickets, the talent does.

↵