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Los Angeles, California Saturday night, July 29, 2006. The Dodgers had won their matinee with the Nationals, and so I had a rare off night in the middle of the summer. Roy Jones, Jr. (once upon a time a long time ago, the pound-for-pound best boxer in the world) was fighting a chap named Prince Badi Ajamu (from Philadelphia) in the boxing hotbed of Boise, Idaho. On pay-per-view no less. $24.95. Talk about bubkus for the buck. Prince Bandar, Prince Charles, or the artist formally known as Prince would have made the promotion infinitely more compelling. My cousin, he of disposable income and a huge fight fan invited me over to watch. The fight (such that it was) reminded me how and why I decided to leave boxing in the rear view mirror a decade earlier. The Prince was hopelessly over-matched against an over-the-hill former light heavyweight champion. The television production was to be charitable, sophomoric. It looked like they were fighting in a half-empty high school gymnasium. Digesting some Doritos, watching with passionate indifference, I flashed back to a decade earlier. On a late fall, early winter afternoon in 1996 I walked into Howard Katz's office. Howard was my boss at ESPN, and to this day is my friend. I had to tell him what I had been thinking for the previous year or more. I wanted out of boxing, a sport that I had covered since 1980. The first fight I covered was Muhammad Ali's second to the last, the unmerciful beating he absorbed at the hands of Larry Holmes in the parking lot of Caesar's Palace.  The last golden age of boxing ended a decade ago, replaced by a sport that's not going away, but going nowhere. Sixteen years later the last golden age of boxing was at an end. I was convinced the future of boxing as a big-time event-driven sport was as bleak as the view from Katz's large corner office. Aside from the assorted satellite dishes and a building or two off in the distance on the ESPN campus in Bristol, Connecticut, the sky was grey, the leaves were gone. So too, I had concluded was the sport that I had known, lived and covered. I told Howard I wanted off the boxing beat. He couldn't believe it. It made no sense. I had delivered some kind of sucker punch to him. After all, boxing had gone a long way to define my television persona and give me a higher profile and greater recognition than I ever thought possible. For me, this was no Cosellian crisis of conscience. It had nothing to do with the sport, which at its best is the most violent, yet noble and courageous of them all. It had nothing to do with the bling things or the pinky-ringed rogues who ran it. They were after all, invaluable characters to the ongoing multi-media circus at which I had had a ringside seat for going on 17 years. It had nothing to do with a growing number of thugs who were either on their way into, or fresh out of jail. The sleaze element was undeniable, although the vibe had grown increasingly ugly. But that was the price of doing business in boxing, or at least covering it. The first rule of business in boxing is that there are few rules, or if there were and they happened to be the same as yesterday's, it was a pleasant coincidence. And most certainly it had nothing to do with the fighters themselves, for whom I have as much respect as any athletes I have known. As I looked at boxing's horizon, it was flat. It was barren. Boxing had fallen, and there was no doubt in my mind it would never get up. Oh, the sport would continue, but not in the way I had viewed it for the previous decade and a half. I thought then, as I do now, the occasional match would peak the interest of the fight fan, but few bouts would be transcendent enough to grab the casual cash-paying fan. The days of Ali, Holmes, Hagler, Hearns, Duran, Leonard, Cooney, Bowe, Holyfield, even Tyson had come and gone. During the era I reported the sport, first on network radio and later on television for ESPN, the top tier fighters were compelling personalities who actually fought one another. They had stories to tell, and many different places to tell them. But in my time in the game, a disturbing trend was underway. The great fighters fought less, with fewer outlets providing them a canvas on which to paint their artwork with their blood. As the elite fighters, promoters and networks were awash in cash, the fighters grew increasingly reluctant to fight as often as they once had. Financially they didn't have to. For the elite boxers once or twice a year in the ring (not to mention the weeks and months of torturous training) was more than enough. A loss on the big stage could transform a multi-million dollar fighter into a multi-thousand dollar fighter as instantly and as painfully as a crisp jab to the tip of the nose. Risk had overtaken reward in the minds of too many fighters and their managers. Human nature had invaded what some see as an inhuman exercise. And while these champions exited stage right, fewer new ones entered stage left. And therein was the deadly dilemma for a sport that in the first half of the century may have been the most popular in this country. Simply put, fewer quality fighters fought lesser quality fights for fewer fans. Bad trend. More and more, the high quality inner city athletes found they could punch their ticket to potential riches, by hitting a jump shot or by knocking someone on his ass with shoulder pads, rather than be hit in the nose or knocked on his own ass, by someone's gloved fist. (Now for the prerequisite caveat: Boxers since the beginning of time, used the sport as their way out of the ghetto, be it Jewish, Italian, Irish, African-American.) All the while network television had not only turned its back on boxing, it turned it off. Completely. The networks had grown weary of the increasingly idiosyncratic boxing industry. Too many so-called organizations. Too few reputable personalities for the executives on Sixth Avenue, not to mention the precarious nature of the fighters themselves. If a boxer couldn't make weight or became injured at the last minute, or wanted more money (imagine that?) the networks suddenly had enormous holes of programming to fill. It was simple as A-B-C. Network television no longer wanted or needed the headache of boxing. Football on Sunday at 1:00? Game on. Boxing on Saturday? Well, probably. In the 70s and 80s with ABC's Wide World of Sports, CBS Sports Spectacular and NBC's anthology offering, you could generally count on the big names to appear at 4:30 on a Saturday afternoon taking on some at least fairly legitimate opponent. As a year wore on, whether it was a Holmes or a Cooney or a Leonard or a Duran or a Hagler, storylines developed. The fighters were seen, the rivalries cultivated, their personalities were sold and solidified – up close and personal. We liked these guys. Or we hated them and wanted them beaten to a pulp by the guys we liked.
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