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Boxing was once called the “Sport of Kings” and had a certain elegance and majestic quality to it, but those were the days of yesteryear to be sure. More recently, boxing has experienced more freak shows and prima donnas then an episode of Jenny Jones turned Jerry Springer. Low blows are bad and hitting a man when he’s down is worse, but biting a man’s ear off (see: Tyson v. Holyfield) is just weird. Over the last few years, the sport itself has tried to bring the fans back in and give them the best product possible, and the fans are ready for boxing to become a mainstream sport again.
It’s hard to imagine boxing will ever be at the point it was in the early 1900s, when families would set their schedules around boxing matches, and the matches were held in stadiums that could hold 50,000+ people. There isn’t a Muhammad Ali or a Joe Frazier in today’s sport, no George Foreman or Sugar Ray Leonard (or Robinson for that matter), but there are marketable personalities nonetheless. Roy Jones Jr. could be one of the greatest boxers ever, even after his loss to Antonio Tarver, another great boxer of this generation. Lennox Lewis was a worthy champion, even if he was around for only a short time. The Klitschko brothers of Russia could run the sport for years to come, and Bernard Hopkins shows no signs of slowing his dominance over the Middleweight division. The sport doesn’t have a superstar like in previous generations, but it’s still a respectable sport that can hold it’s own in the ever-changing society of today. |
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