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By Brett Conway - About a year ago, many in the sports media were all a-twitter about Floyd Mayweather’s junior middleweight match against Oscar De La Hoya. But they didn’t praise. They gloated. Would it prove to be the last gasp of boxing? Would boxing finally show that it is a sport that is out of date, for criminals, lowlifes, and bums? Would this last event be a fitting denouement for a sport that boasted athletes that transcended the red-light district of sport – athletes like Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis, Muhammad Ali, and Sugar Ray Leonard?
As the sporting world watched and the sporting press, including “Sports Illustrated,” circled from above, waiting to pick over the corpse of boxing, something funny happened. The event showed boxing doesn’t need the super event to keep going. It just needs good match ups. The completion of the Vazquez-Marquez trilogy, the Marquez-Pacquiao rematch, Cotto-Mosley, Calzaghe-Hopkins, and, yes, even Jones-Trinidad – all these fights showed there is still a lot of interest in boxing and that it is far from dead. Boxing picked itself up, brushed itself off, and once again sprang forward, windmilling. [details]
As the sporting world watched and the sporting press, including “Sports Illustrated,” circled from above, waiting to pick over the corpse of boxing, something funny happened. The event showed boxing doesn’t need the super event to keep going. It just needs good match ups. The completion of the Vazquez-Marquez trilogy, the Marquez-Pacquiao rematch, Cotto-Mosley, Calzaghe-Hopkins, and, yes, even Jones-Trinidad – all these fights showed there is still a lot of interest in boxing and that it is far from dead. Boxing picked itself up, brushed itself off, and once again sprang forward, windmilling. [details]
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