CJR Scene
An Echo in the Ring
The promoter Lou DiBella spends about $50,000 a year on steaks, hoping to entice boxing writers to cover his fighters. But so far his high-protein publicity campaign hasn’t yielded high returns. How can he tell? Because no one outside the insular world of boxing can name one pug that he has under contract.
It’s not his fault. “The industry’s in the shitter,” DiBella told me recently at one such press feed at Gallagher’s, a midtown chophouse off Broadway. The place was deserted and DiBella — a Harvard-educated lawyer and former HBO executive — was sitting at the bar, nibbling on the celery stalk in his Bloody Mary shortly after noon. “The bottom line,” he added, is that “nobody has any faith anymore. It’s a nasty, horrible, corrupt business. Advertisers run for the hills. Sports editors could not care less. It’s depressing.”
The dearth of coverage can easily be traced to the fight game’s disappearance from public consciousness. When television sets began to sprout in living rooms in the 1950s, the cigar-chomping crowds at neighborhood fight clubs disappeared. When the often-dubious officials at the sanctioning bodies doubled the sport’s eight weight classes — looking to collect more membership fees from fighters — suddenly there were too many champions, too many noncompetitive weight classes, too many titles for sale. Now there are too many names to follow and fewer fans to remember them. There is no hero, no enemy; no Ali or Louis or Schmeling or Dempsey who can infuse a boxing match with social and political consequences. What remains can often be found at the free luncheons at Gallagher’s.
The party was held in the back room. A small array of silver-haired trainers, Boxing Commission officials, Internet writers, and the fighter of the day — a flashy, twenty-two-year-old junior welterweight named Paulie Malignaggi — were huddled in the corner. Sitting there, I found it hard to believe there was a time when a legion of decorated sportswriters covered boxing, and when literary heavies like Jack London, Mark Twain, Heywood Broun, Jimmy Cannon, and A.J. Liebling worked to capture the sport. Armies of stringers and columnists marched to prefight camps in the Catskills and other far-flung destinations, filing colorful dispatches on such minute details as the champ’s changing diet or superstitions.
But this intimate relationship between prizefighting and the press has frayed. Today, less than a handful of reporters cover boxing. The most consistent coverage a fighter can get is on the Web, at small, mostly home-brewed sites where flattering news can often be purchased with the promise of advertisements — or filet mignon. There are critics who argue that the loosely regulated boxing industry could benefit from the oversight that press coverage would bring. They say boxers — among the most dedicated, hard-working athletes — deserve the same media attention that football players or race car drivers get.
But a stronger argument for better play may be what attracted the old writers in the first place: boxing is elemental, and fighters still have great stories to tell.
Fighting in DiBella’s recent boxing shows, for instance, there is Yuri Foreman (12-0), a fair-haired Israeli émigré who learned to box sparring with Palestinians and moved to Brighton Beach with his trainer to pursue his dream of being a a professional fighter. He recently married Leyla Leidecker, a model-turned-boxer, and they hope to fight on the same card some day. There are the Clottey brothers, Emanuel (21-5) and Joshua (24-1), chiseled Ghanian welterweights who often are supported in the ring by a raucous band of African drummers whose wanton beating of a cowbell gives the timekeeper fits. There’s John Duddy, a handsome amateur who came to Queens only seven months ago from rural County Derry, Ireland, to work as a carpenter. He’s had three quick wins with three first-round knockouts. Duddy virtually sold out the house for his last performance, raking in an estimated $18,000 in tickets purchased by bellowing Irish fans toting flags and passing bottles of whisky. Most likely, he earned $3,000.
Trying to get attention from newspaper reporters and, ultimately, the sport’s rainmakers at networks like HBO can be “frustrating,” Paulie Malignaggi tells me at Gallagher’s. Toward that end, Malignaggi, who has sixteen wins and no losses thanks to fast hands and cautious matchmaking, has resorted to carnival gimmicks: he calls himself the “Magic Man,” wears tasseled shorts into the ring, sticks his tongue out at the TV cameras, and flaps his pectorals like a Broadway showgirl. “That’s what everyone likes to see,” he says, acknowledging the calculated showmanship in his clowny anchor punches and phony windmill wind-ups. Such buffoonery backfired on Malignaggi in one recent fight, as the crowd rallied behind Shad Howard, a twiggish journeyman brought in from Arkansas for target practice. Howard went the six-round distance and earned a standing ovation. Malignaggi, pounding his chest after the victory, was heckled.
“They may hate me,” he said about the crowd that night. “But it’s not a bad thing. Next time, they’ll just want to see me more.”
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