Social media, boxing, and violence

History repeats

Like many other sports figures, boxers are turning to social media to build their brand. Social media (SM) won’t just build a boxer’s brand, however. It will also change the boxer and, as the boxer-SM links multiply, will probably change boxing. Television, cable news, newspapers, and other media altered how boxing was seen in the twentieth century. The power of SM far exceeds that of traditional media. My prediction? Watch out, boxing.

Boxing is steeped in ritual and rules. Yet, like other tradition-rich practices, boxing has a history of change. Fights to the finish, sometimes lasting 90 rounds, rewarded the boxer who could outlast his opponent. With the professionalization of boxing established by the Marquis of Queensbury rules (1867; there were earlier rules), rounds had a fixed length and timing became important. Boxing soon moved from bare knuckles to gloves (required in 1892). Other changes, also designed for safety, included the ban on hovering, meaning that a boxer who had knocked down his opponent could not stand over him (1927), the use of mouthpieces (1930s), and the standing-eight count (1961).

Along with these internal changes came external changes, the most important being the advent of televised bouts in the 1950s. Television brought boxing a new, national audience. People in non-urban areas, rural residents especially, could now see famous boxers on a regular basis. However, this development also had a negative effect. Neighborhood boxing gyms and clubs had long been incubators for new boxing talent and had been integral to the sport for decades. These clubs suffered when local audiences began to stay home to watch big-name matches, as Rafael García points out (“The Fight Game Has Changed,” online at The Fight City, 2018).

More media-driven changes came in the 1970s. Boxers had always been tied to promotional companies, which had exclusivity contracts. When pay-per-view fights and cable broadcasts arrived, boxers were also tied to network contracts. Cable and pay-per-view fees could fund flashy matches that might not have been possible otherwise. But the new arrangements also meant that fights between boxers holding conflicting contracts could not take place. Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao could not get a fight until 2015, when neither was in his prime (Mayweather won). Welterweights Errol Spence, Jr., and Terence Crawford could fight in 2023 only because the boxers themselves spent five years arranging the match (Crawford won).

Television shrank the distance between boxers and viewers. This too was a mixed blessing. Boxing was more immediate, but viewers could now see, up close, the damage one boxer could do to another as the referee looked on. Television gave everyone a ringside seat for sometimes-deadly violence. A turning point came in 1962, when the nation witnessed Ray Mancini (below, left) putting Kim Duk-koo into a coma. Kim died a few days later. Sponsors did not want their names associated with beatings like that one. Mancini’s name would no longer sell products, and boxing lost its power as a televised draw.

Thereafter championship fights were limited to 12 rounds rather than 15, a new gesture to safety but, as we have seen, part of a long trend. Pressed by limits on the length and number of rounds, boxers began to focus on the knockout blow. In this sense, the changes designed to make boxing safer also made it more dangerous. The knockout punch became a focus for fighters and fans alike. Boxing began to seem like staged entertainment and spectacle, a point made by Elliot Gorn in The Manly Art.

The media giveth; the media taketh away. In a changing culture, fans were more willing to discuss the damage boxing did to famous men boxers. Everybody saw the ruin of Muhammad Ali, his Parkinson’s Disease well-advanced, when he opened the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. Boxers become more concerned with safety, and this had consequences for their fighting styles. Ali’s style, tremendously successful, also proved to have been extremely dangerous (Ali, below, in 1977, with Ernie Shavers; Ali won). Others took note. García suggests that Floyd Mayweather was especially conscious of avoiding damage and that some people began to see his fights as less exciting because they were less risky. There was a shortage of famous heavyweights to take part in celebrated matches that meant large purses, big crowds, and memorable action. Epic contests (Ali and Foreman, for example) were rare.

The media we now regard as traditional succeeded in reshaping boxing as a form of entertainment, but, as we have seen, at some cost to boxing. What lies ahead? SM will not make boxing safer, and in fact there are good reasons to believe that the growing connection between boxing and SM will encourage the opposite development.

We can get some idea of the transforming power of SM from Christine Rosen’s recent analysis of SM’s effect on news broadcasts (“The End of Cable News?” appears in the July/August Commentary).

Rosen points out that SM favor brevity, speed, and fragmentation. Social media users get their news from their preferred platforms whenever they wish, in bits. Rosen cites the “mantra” of Axios, an online news site, which is “smart brevity.” She describes the site’s bullet-point posts as “microdoses” of news, but for many people the doses are not “micro.” They are the news. It’s not what is fit to print or publish any longer; it’s what can be shrunk to fit the user’s time. Seeing a fight in “microdoses” will be very different from seeing it in the ring or watching it on television.

SM users have an impersonal experience of the news that is also random, not formulated as a package of faces and voices that radio and television have made familiar. The newscast of 15 or 30 minutes, the experience of the news anchor (itself a revealing media term), and other authoritative frames of the nightly news disappear. In SM they are replaced by the “media personality,” the role assumed by Tucker Carlson and by Megyn Kelly, who operate as independent voices free of the commercial and editorial constraints of cable and networks.

Rosen emphasizes that social media favor extremes. The balanced presentation of information, abandoned by traditional media in the Trump-Covid era, is no longer a positive value, as Carlson demonstrates. The likely developments in cable news will be stronger partisan identities, mirroring the partisan narrowness of SM “bullet points” and “smart” but brief summaries. Rosen notes that SM free reporters to “reveal their partisan biases and obnoxious personalities” without fear of editorial interference, for better or worse, and mostly for worse. Boxing commentators will likewise be free to reveal their biases and become media personalities themselves.

Content providers have to respond to the pressure of fitting their material to the small screen and to the peripatetic habits of SM users. Content, we often say, follows form. But the form-content dichotomy is more complex than we might expect, and, surprisingly, it requires that we look at boxing in new ways. History repeats itself, and perhaps the new boxing will look something like boxing a century ago or more.

Familiar assumptions about form and content were undone half a century ago by Marshall McLuhan. We used to think of form as a genre—the novel, say, or short story—and content as the plot (love story, tragedy). Not after McLuhan, who is remembered today as author of the memorable phrase that “the medium is the message,” a cryptic formulation from his 1964 book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (quote from p. 1).

McLuhan redefined both “message” and “medium.” He wrote that “the personal and social consequences of any medium—that is, of any extension of ourselves—result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.” A medium is an extension of ourselves. The “message” is not what a medium “says” (moral instruction, for example). “The ‘message’ of any medium or technology,” McLuhan wrote, “is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.”

McLuhan gave the example of the railway, which did not introduce movement but instead accelerated motion and extended its scale. Social changes followed and new social roles were created. Compare the telephone and its impact on communication. The “message” is the social change that new technology creates. The message of SM is greater than the messages of either the railway or the telephone. SM have enlarged scale, sped up pace, and bypassed traditional platforms and structures.

McLuhan argued that the content of a medium is not a message (i.e., a moral) but is always another medium. He gives examples. The content of writing (a medium) is speech (also a medium); the content of print (a medium) is the written word (also a medium). The content of the phone is the voice. The media content of SM include print, image, sound, and action (video).

If every medium is itself a medium, let’s ask how boxing is a medium. Google the phrase “boxing as a medium,” and you will see that boxing has been regarded as a medium for many things: a medium for teaching discipline, for getting in shape, and for releasing energy, even venting anger. Those are among the social effects of boxing. They are some of the changes that boxing can produce in an individual who pulls on gloves, works out, and, especially, spars. Boxing extends the boxer. Boxing can help you get fit, add self-defense to your skill set, boost your confidence, and change you—extend you—in other ways (not all of them, it should be said, for the good).

Television and cable both expanded the audience of boxing and changed boxing. Today most commentators agree that boxing is in decline. Professional boxing has become somewhat safer, and boxers have become more conscious of the dangers of fights. The old media didn’t just diminish local boxing clubs but ended up diminishing nationally televised boxing matches which seldom featured top-ranked boxers. The attention-getting fights (Spence vs. Crawford) moved to pay-per-view. Views run as high as $90 per fight. Boxing fans wonder if the fights are worth it.

It is clear that most of the advantages UFC holds over boxing are those that offer a more violent experience that is more satisfying to followers. “All boxing turns into is guys dancing around the ring looking for the best way to punch each other out,” sports writer Scott Carasic notes dismissively. “This leads to boring matches and a bunch of people wondering what exactly is going on. The lack of anything but punching and dancing leads to a goofy scoring system that isn’t easy to understand by casual fight fans . . .” (“8 Reasons the UFC Will Always Be Better Than Boxing,” Bleacher Report, June 2012).  

Traditional media seem to have made boxing boring and fans listless, at least as Carasic sees things. Now the pendulum seems poised to swing the other way. SM might well make boxing more popular and, in the process, pressure boxing to become less safe. That’s because UFC is famous for violence, speed, and spontaneity. Carasik identifies several areas in which UFC is better than boxing. For example, UFC’s “submission”—a “tap out” when one fighter yields to pain—makes it more likely that a fighter will be injured, so the fight is more “interesting” and “fun to watch,” as Carasik puts it. UFC’s steel cages “enhance the draw to the gruesome sport,” recalling  its bloody “arena roots.” Perhaps he means Christians being fed to lions, men getting clubbed to death, and other sights “fun to watch”? What viewers are looking for, that “bunch of people” who wonder what is going on, is a darker than “fun.”

In addition, UFC’s 5 5-minute rounds are more challenging than 12 3-minute rounds. Longer rounds maximize drain on the fighters. Since UFC allows feet and knees to hit the face, fans “don't get bored as quickly,” and it is “much more entertaining to see two guys kill each other in five.” Any boxer who has sparred knows how long three minutes can seem. Nobody says “it’s only three minutes.”

The results of fights are clearer as well because UFC is a mixed martial arts promotion company inside a verical corporate structure (owned and operated by Zuffa, which subsidiary of Endeavor Group Holdings). In contrast, boxing has no top-down structure but instead comprises four independent bodies: the World Boxing Association (WBA), World Boxing Council (WBC), World Boxing Organization (WBO), and International Boxing Federation (IBF).  Each of these four groups holds a title for each of its 17 divisions, and “that makes a total of 68 possible men who can claim to be the ‘best boxer in the world’ at a given time,” writes Carasic.

Fans care less about administrative transparency than they do about action, however. But many of the boxing matches they want to see—two outstanding welterweights, say—cannot happen because of exclusivity contracts. In contrast, UFC has a single hierarchy of fighters, and champions are forced to defend their titles or lose them. There is no ducking matches, and the years-long scheming and dramas of boxing don’t exist on UFC.

In boxing, boxers box. But now media stars sometimes box. Witness the match between Jake Paul and Tommy Fury (Fury won, split decision; on Paul, see previous post here). Fury is 8-0. He was the first boxer Paul had fought. Paul might have started a trend. Pacquiao recently started training another SM star, Vladimir Grand (below, left). Grand is a model; boxing will not be kind to that face. He has no fighting experience but he has a big SM following that will lead to lucrative matches and deals. It is a clever way for Pacquiao to move to the next step in his own career. It is not, however, a way to build the career of a serious boxer. But indications are that SM are already changing our idea of what a serious boxer looks like.

Boxing today can use much of what UFC does on SM: to engage fans with highlights from fights an to offer interviews with boxers and glimpses of behind-the-scenes events, such as warm-ups. On another level, however, we see that SM is changing our understanding of who a boxer is. Paul and Grand are boxers only in the sense that they take off their shirts, pull on gloves, and step into the ring, knowing that a paycheck of six figures or more will be their reward. If boxing cards fill up with boxers like them, with their huge followings and marketability, there will be less room for trained boxers on the way up—unless, of course, they too become SM stars. Boxing matches will turn into battles between SM stars. Most fans will see these fight in post-match “microdoses” on YouTube and other media.

The likelihood of this sad result is increased by the lack of a central boxing organization. Four different groups can take four different approaches to integrating the likes of Paul or Grand into their boxing cards, adjusting rules and requirements to make these changes happen. The new SM-trained generation of fans will barely recognize towering figures like Mayweather or Pacquiao, except perhaps as boxers who train SM stars.

SM seem designed to favor the fast action of UFC and seem poised to push boxing to become more violent. This brings us to a paradox. Boxing a hundred years ago (or more) was more like UFC than boxing is today. Knuckles drew blood faster than gloves. Teeth broke faster without mouth-guards. Fights-to-the-finish drained more of the boxers’ energy than 12-round contests. Fights-to-the-finish left no doubt about who won. All that is left of old boxing is the knockout punch, the clearest possible answer to who won.

Many changes that dulled the edge of the old boxing also worked against the popularity of the sport. But what was done can be undone. In fights today only the conclusion matters. SM fast-track viewers to the ending, with a microdoses of violence on the way, shrinking the sport to the few moments that fit the time scrolling users have for both the medium and the message. It is likely that boxing organizations will get the message and go to work on boxing as a medium. It is not impossible that boxing will become more violent, more like it used to be than it is today.