THE FIGHT’S NOT OVER: Boxing still keeping old-school vibe
‘There was this particular day when we had to go to three cities in one day and I would then wake up in the middle of the night thinking where I was.’
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‘There was this particular day when we had to go to three cities in one day and I would then wake up in the middle of the night thinking where I was.’
MANNY Pacquiao
ETHAN MILLER/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
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The sport of boxing remains the same despite the rule changes that have been applied the past decades or so.
It is the coverage of boxing which has significantly evolved.
Speaking with renowned promoter Bob Arum a few years back, the Top Rank chief recalled how it was in the 1980s.
When Marvin Hagler took on Thomas Hearns for the world middleweight championship of the world in 1985, the Hall of Fame promoter narrated how his publicity team devised a 21-city press tour that took just 18 or 19 days to finish.
One guy who was a part of what was oftentimes called the Magical Mystery Tour — obviously inspired by the Beatles album — looked back with fondness.
“There was this particular day when we had to go to three cities in one day and I would then wake up in the middle of the night thinking where I was,” he said.
Arum initially thought the two fighters won’t have the patience to deal with the media on a daily basis.
On a few occasions, Top Rank would bring in a few writers to join the sortie as the papers then had so much influence.
While multi-city tours were still being done, the number of cities being visited has decreased considerably.
Nowadays, New York and Los Angeles are the leading tour stops. Sometimes, Las Vegas is thrown into the mix.
During the heyday of eight-division champion Manny Pacquiao, Arum took a page from the Hagler-Hearns saga when he did a number of press tours as well.
As technology was making deep inroads in the coverage and publicity strategies, Arum still proceeded with quite a number of media gigs that sent Pacquiao and his opponent visiting not just New York and Las Vegas but places like Dallas, San Francisco, Washington D.C., San Juan in Puerto Rico and even the United Kingdom.
One time, Arum took a long flight to the Philippines and participated in a tour when Pacquiao fought Mexican archrival Juan Manuel Marquez.
With the tour’s kick off in Manila, Pacquiao and Marquez, alongside with their respective teams and a couple of Filipino sportswriters, this writer included, went on a dizzying 25,000-mile international tour in 2011 that lasted less than a week.
The succeeding stops were New York, Los Angeles and Mexico City and by the time the two scribes had returned to Manila, they had looked as if they had just stepped out of a lunar module.
Nowadays, only the big, big fights merit this promotional setup since conference calls can be done with the help of modern technology.
Gone are the days when a promoter had to bring in the two fighters for interviews since it can be done in so many ways using different social media platforms without compromising their comfort.
The rise of vloggers has also altered the way events and actual fights are being covered.
Presently, content is given top priority and the respective following of these so-called influencers have changed the landscape of boxing coverage.
Boxing fans of today are a lot different from those of yesteryears.
Those who follow boxing now are oftentimes bandwagoners and fanboys.
Without proper journalistic training, many of the vloggers have become prone to mistakes since they lack solid contacts and understanding of the sport.
Still, there is no denying the vloggers’ reach and popularity especially in the local setting.
But in the boxing community, the writers on the beat remain the most reliable sources of information and not the vloggers who, most of the time, lift info from a story and copy videos for the sake of content.
Indeed, the days of holding multi-city press tours are over.
But boxing and the coverage of the sport, remains essentially the same.
Try to attend a big fight and you’d see who among those who cover boxing are given the premium ringside seats.
