Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Top 10 "Boxing in the Media" Events of 2007

Man, it was a slugfest of a year for boxing media in 2007. The sport's top magazine got a new owner. The sweet science had a gigantic year on pay-per-view TV -- despite the threat from Mixed Martial Arts -- and even the mainstream press paid attention to boxing's biggest event. Still, newspapers continued to shed boxing beat writers, and the Internet picked up some of the slack. Here are my top ten boxing media events of 2007:

1. De La Hoya Buys The Ring
After more than a year of back-office talks, De La Hoya pulled the trigger on a Rupert Murdoch-like takeover. He set up subsidiary Sports Entertainment Publications to buy The Ring and a few other fight books from Kappa Publishing, whose real forte was word-search puzzle magazines. The influx of money and boxing appreciation from the new bosses could be very good for the magazine. Oscar pledged to improve the mag's production quality, timeliness and Web presence and keep his promotional company's hands off the editorial and the rankings. But some observers (especially rival promoters) still fret about how Oscar's control will influence the Bible of Boxing. As long as ODLH doesn't pull an Oprah - renaming the mag O and putting himself on the cover every week - that'll be a good start.

2. The Vanishing Newspaper Boxing Beat Writer
Ron Borges left the Boston Globe to do TV and other projects. Michael Hirsley retired from the Chicago Tribune after winning two first-place Barney awards (but continues to freelance). Kevin Iole left the Las Vegas Review-Journal for Yahoo. Tim Graham left the Buffalo News to cover an NFL team that allegedly plays in Miami. The Philadelphia Inquirer's staff purge snared fledgling boxing writer Don Steinberg (uh, that's me, and it still hurts, but I continue to freelance for them).

3. Boxing in Non-Boxing Places
Mostly they played up it as "the fight to save boxing." But, still, it was encouraging to see boxing making the covers of top sports magazines and receiving legitimate coverage elsewhere. Sports Illustrated gave a cover to the Mayweather-De La Hoya fight. So did ESPN The Magazine -- its first boxing cover ever. ESPN "Sports Guy" Bill Simmons, who had called the sport dying, actually attended a fight (Mayweather-Hatton) and decided boxing is really exciting. Even Time gave Oscar-versus-Floyd a little quality time. HBO, meanwhile, launched its 24/7 series, a well-produced infomercial that, airing many nights after The Sopranos or Entourage, brought boxing added mainstream attention.

4. Merchant-izing
HBO seemed ready to say goodbye to Larry Merchant in the Spring, then it came to its senses and took him back, at least part-time. Boxing and its fans are better off for as long as Larry stays behind that red-ball microphone. Merchant, now 76, isn't just an announcer. He's a journalist, bringing decades of experience to ringside, willing to question every fight and fighter that deserves to be questioned. Here's a great story on the machinations at HBO.

5. Pay Per View Seems to Be Catching On
The good news is that HBO had its best year ever for pay-per-view boxing. The bad news is that HBO had its best year ever for pay-per-view boxing. HBO said it got 4.8 million buys and $255 million in PPV revenue from its eight events in in 2007. That's great for the future of big-money mega-fights. It's not so great for fans or the future of big fights on regular premium cable, basic cable, or free network TV. A football fan can buy a package to watch every NFL game for $250. By my calculation, it was $400 just for HBO's eight pay-per-views in 2007: Barrera-Marquez ($45), De La Hoya-Mayweather ($55), Cotto-Judah ($50), Hopkins-Wright ($50), Morales-Diaz ($45), Pacquiao-Barrera II ($50), Cotto-Mosley ($50) and Mayweather-Hatton ($55). I'm not even counting Showtime PPVs. Throw in monthly fees for regular HBO and Showtime, plus the occasional off-the-grid Evander Holyfield PPV, and it starts adding up like real money.

By the way, do you know that an anagram for Bernard Hopkins is "HBO Inks Pardner"?


6. The Rise of ESPN.com
Call ‘em the worldwide leader, the four-letter word, whatever you'd like. It's nice to see ESPN.com giving boxing and boxing writers a growing venue. The site this year hired a boxing editor, Darius Ortiz, who has supplemented torch-bearer columnist Dan Rafael with veteran contributors like Tom Hauser and Bert Sugar, making ESPN.com's boxing page a daily read and one of the top boxing sites on the Web. (Disclosure: I'm a contributor too, so maybe I'm biased.)

7. Online Video Proliferates
Yes, Viacom (Showtime) and Time Warner (HBO) took action to get illicit videos of their their boxing matches removed from YouTube. But anyone who knows how to operate Google knows that there's more boxing video online than ever, and it's a great research tool. Even HBO's are fights still online for free (in better quality than YouTube) -- at the officially sanctioned AOL Video.

8. Passing the Mic
Beyond the Merchant saga, the TV networks shuffled blow-by-blow talent, and it all seemed to work out nicely. The veteran Bob Papa moved to HBO Boxing After Dark to replace Fran Charles. Nick Charles has been stellar on Versus with Wally Matthews. Max Kellerman stepped up to play wing on HBO's scoring line, and even Lennox Lewis is getting the hang of things behind the green-ball microphone. And is that Vinny Paz providing his unique analysis on tape-delayed Comcast boxing-casts?

9. A Movie About Writing About Boxing
Resurrecting the Champ came and went quickly to mixed reviews, but how often do you get to see a newsroom movie and a boxing movie in the same movie? Okay, the press does seem to have a role in most boxing movies (The Harder They Fall, The Great White Hope, and The Great White Hype come to mind). But usually it's a grotesque, one-dimensional caricature. The press in this one is much more realistically grotesque. Resurrecting will be an April DVD. Scheduled to hit theaters in 2008 are a boxing comedy (The Hammer starring Adam Carolla) and a documentary (Diego Luna's Chavez).

10. The Contender Hangs in There
Alfonso Gomez's win over Arturo Gatti gave The Contender new legitimacy - wow, somebody from a TV reality show beat someone in real life! It was like Kelly Clarkson winning a Grammy. The latest season, numero three, focused more on boxing than on goofball contests and family melodrama, and it delivered some real-deal fighters, plus a bang-up, live finale between Sakio Bika and Jaidon Codrington. Most important, it kept boxing in weeknight prime-time, on basic cable.

Sunday, December 2, 2007

FightJudge.com Looks for a Bigger Score

I always thought that if you had a great idea, brought personal passion to developing it, and executed it flawlessly, all the rewards of success would follow.

Build it and they they will come. The world will beat a path to your door. Blah blah blah.

About a year ago, Corey Shelton, an amateur boxing judge in Atlanta and former IBM computer guy, worked with two partners to launch
FightJudge.com. It's a free web site that allows everyone who is watching a boxing match to score the rounds and text-chat live with one another other as the punches fly. I've covered and been involved with online ventures for about as long as online ventures have existed (since the 1980s), and apart from Amazon.com and Google, I have rarely seen a site that did what it set out to do so well.

The site's design is elegant and enticing. The interactive scoring system is fast and works without a glitch. A few seconds after a round ends, you get a pull-down menu that lets you assign a score for the round to each boxer. Then it automatically tabulates your running overall score for the fight and ultimately determines a consensus score for all the fan-judges. Official judging should be done this way. And FightJudge keeps adding features that make it more functional and easier to use. One can imagine Jim Lampley, after complaining about a questionable decision, emphasizing his point by saying, “And here's what the fans watching the fight on HBO thought...” (FightJudge users gave Jose Santa Cruz a 118-109 victory over Joel Casamayor last month, while official judges awarded Casamayor a controversial split decision.)

“That's really our ultimate goal, to align ourselves with a network,” says Shelton. “From from a technology and accuracy standpoint, we could do it. From a sheer volume standpoint, no. I would love to go out and say 'FightJudge scored De La Hoya-Mayweather a draw.' Because we did. But the reality is that it was less than 20 people [on FightJudge] who scored that fight.”

Twenty people, out of more than two million pay per view buys for that fight. It makes no sense! (Of course, if the announcers were to mention the service on the air, it would get a lot more than 20 people.)
Why aren't more people as fascinated by FightJudge as I am?

Yeah, you need to be in front of your computer to score a fight while you're watching it on TV. It's a bit of a hassle, though a wireless laptop can work just fine when you're sitting on the couch. Boxing writers could easily fire up the site from ringside (a new feature creates a custom graphic of a user's score -- see above -- that a writer can keep and publish). There's even a stripped-down version of the site for use on mobile phones. Shelton dreams of crowds at big fights scoringkeeping en masse between rounds.


I was stuck at home for the Miguel Cotto-Shane Mosley bout. I went online to score the fight and landed in the FightJudge chat room, where about 20 guys were firing off wisecracks about the action. It was almost like having friends at home to watch with.

But the site, which launched at the start of 2007, hasn't been able to get much traction.

"I don't know how to interpret the reaction by boxing fans," he says. "If you look at boxing on the web, it's pretty pervasive. There is a fan base online."

The Versus network has its own live fan scorecard online that the TV commentators on its Fight Night telecasts refer to. It averages the fan scores and shows results with decimal points -- someone might win a round 9.7 to 9.2. It looks like the scores a girl named Shannon would get in gymnastics. Still, it's a step forward as an interactive, sorta Web 2.0 tool for of boxing. HBO has tried interactive scoring at least once: in 2000 it offered fan scoring of the Bernard Hopkins-Antwun Echols fight through the slow AOLTV and WebTV services, which were used about as much as Ricardo Mayorga's defense. The experiment has not been repeated.

Shelton -- who at IBM led development of sports sites like Wimbledon.org and Masters.org and now works at a healthcare company -- has campaigned to enlist boxing web sites as parners. Secondsout.com recently came on and offers
a customized version of the FightJudge scorecard on its site. Still, the big break hasn't come yet.

“It's been disappointing, but not to the point where it's discouraging us from continuing," Shelton says. "We know we have a good product. Some folks say we are way ahead of our time. I don't think it's true. We're right on time. It's just a matter of adoption."