The boxer as influencer

How social media is changing boxing

Reviewing recent performances at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, a critic commented that “these were two of the best-sold houses I’ve seen since the onset of the pandemic” (both were Mozart operas). That’s good news for the Met. He added, “The end of each performance was greeted with high-pitched, indiscriminate cheering of a kind I would associate with a rock concert or a high-school sporting event. It suggested the advent of a new genre: Y[oung] A[adult] opera.” Is that also good news?

YA boxing is keeping time with YA music. Like opera, boxing has become a platform, a mix of hardware and software that can be built on and connected to other systems. The platforms have not changed much in recent years, but their audiences have. Music and boxing are in the grip of what I call YASM, young adults on social media.

People have worried for some time that the audiences for both opera and boxing were aging. Now both have seized on social media as the way to draw young people to events. It is no surprise that, once in the house, these people behave differently from traditional audiences. They are changing the experience, and, I believe, eventually they will change the products offered on these platforms. Fighter Jake Paul (above) is among those leading the way.

Social media divide into the influencer and the influenced. Both classical music and boxing are becoming dominated by influencers, sharing this trend with high fashion, other sports, and other content platforms. In making way for influencers, both industries are succumbing to the power of the influenced.

Social media offer a new kind of audience experience. In both music and sports, that experience has traditionally been both overt—the audience in the presence of the action—and covert. Covert experience of art and sports is produced by mirror neurons, which create in our brains an imitation of the action we are seeing. A common example is boxers who watch a fight. They start to throw their own punches, as if they were in the ring. In other sports the mirror neurons are also busy. In a baseball game, fans imitate the players and react excitedly, often physically, to their moves, leaping to their feet. It’s almost as if the game is happening to them. (See Your Brain on Cubs: Inside the Heads of Players and Fans, ed. Dan Gordon, and my comments in Boxing and Masculinity, ch. 7.)

Music, like sports, can arouse the audience physically as well as psychologically. Performances stimulate the auditory nerves, and sometimes when a great performance ends on a high point, audience members, like sports fans, leap to their feet and applaud vigorously (see my post on “Music, excitement, and the gay boxer,” 5/15/23). You can sometimes see a pianist in the audience imitating the fingering of the soloist playing on stage.

Social media create a different kind of connection between the boxer, or the musician, and the observer. Social media redefine these roles. The performer or the boxer is now the influencer, the one with expertise and authority. Ticketholders are the influenced, the ones who follow. The experience no longer begins in the sports arena or concert hall; what happens there has become a continuation of a virtual connection that may have been developing for weeks.

YASM and music

The musician-influencer arouses a voluble (as opposed to merely polite) response before he or she has played or sung a note. His followers know the star’s face, his politics, and his cat’s name and probably the cat’s face as well. When they see him in person, they revel in the ongoing (seamless?) relationship created by the all-embracing power of SM. When cellist Yo Yo Ma walked onto the stage of Chicago’s Symphony Center recently, the ovation was Met-Opera noisy, with whistles and cheers. Ma is an influencer with 250k followers on Tik Tok. The reception of Juan Diego Flórez earlier in the season was similar. Florez is an influencer with 150K followers on Instagram. Both musicians have the power to move product (CDs, DVDs) and sell tickets. Music organizations want to do both.

The followers think of themselves less as the performer’s fans than as his friends. To his manager, however, these people are the influencer’s “social relationship assets.” Some of them will buy tickets and show up for the performance, cementing their connection to the performer. The event is the platform. The concert hall and the tickets are the hardware; the influencer is the software. The influenced pay.

YASM, boxers, and boxing

Like tenors and cellists, boxers are becoming influencers. A recent article about Devin Haney, the world’s lightweight champion, hailed him as “the new model of a boxing superstar—a flashy fighter who builds his audience far from the ring” (Joseph Bien-Kahn, Bloomberg Businessweek, May 19, 2023).

Haney (above; lightweight; record 30-W, 0-L) has 2.2 million followers on Instagram. He is an impressive fighter, all agree, but as an influencer he has some catching up to do. The Instagram numbers for other boxer-influencers in the article include:

Gervonta Davis (super-featherweight, lightweight; 29-W, 0-L): 5.6 million followers

Ryan Garcia (lightweight; 23, 1): 10.4 million followers

Jake Paul (cruiserweight; 6, 1): 23 million followers

Canelo Alvarez (welterweight; light-heavyweight; 59-2-2): nearly a quarter million followers on Tik Tok in his first week on the platform.

Alvarez has belatedly learned the most important lesson in boxing today, which is not how to best your opponent in the ring but how to build your YASM profile. The boxers “have to be influencers as much as they are athletes,” says Frank Shea, the manager of Top Rank Boxing Gym, where Haney trains.

Payoffs

What is in YASM for the influenced is the thrill of being connected, however remotely, to a star and to his or her other followers. Those who write about the merits of following advise followers to follow each other and use the connections SM offers. If you follow other followers, some of them will follow you back, although you are not advised to follow everybody who follows you, for various reasons not important here.

By following, you can get more followers. But what will you do with them? If you have a product to move, following is your vehicle for raising awareness and making sales. You have then become an influencer, which is the goal. But one has to wonder just how many of the influenced can become influencers with a reach that is more than a tiny fraction of that of Davis or Garcia, or Flórez or Ma.

The chief benefit of YASM for the follower is psychological: a sense of community of the hip, of belonging to a cyber-smart version of the old-fashioned fan club that had pictures of Elvis in thousands of bedrooms. YASM is more than simply going to a concert or to a fight. It’s an ongoing experience.

The benefits for the followed are tangible. For boxers the rewards are money, bargaining power, endorsements, and other monetized sides of the fight game. Having a lot of followers means that the boxers will get more and better fights. Followers will buy tickets and help to sell out an auditorium with 20,000 seats. They may well be there less for their love of boxing than for the thrill of being in a crowd of other followers, but in either case the followers have to pay.

The influencer is paid for having tens of thousands of followers. Followers work for his brand, repost his content (there’s power for you—or rather, for him), and comment their content (ditto). Your job as a follower is to boost profits for the followed. No wonder stars are eager to build their YASM presence. If you have a product (a CD, a concert), followers will enrich you and spread your fame.

Unlike tenors, boxers don’t have CDs (at least not usually), but they do sell tickets. A boxer can’t have as many fights in a year as a tenor can have performances. The boxer’s products are his fights. The benefits he reaps from his followers have to be realized indirectly. Big YASM numbers now help the boxer work his way up the ranks and give his managers leverage when it comes to his fees, his purses, choice of his opponents, and so on. The managers also benefit from the followers; they have more and better product to sell. None of this is related to the boxer’s boxing, of course, but to the theater of YASM.

Todd deBoef, the promoter who is president of Top Rank boxing, says that Paul, who has 23 million followers, “can barely fight.” Clips from his fight with Tommy Fury (February 2023) show Paul’s sprawling form, more like MAA than boxing. 

Paul (above, left) had a career in television before getting into Mixed Martial Arts and boxing (Disney Channel). He boxed a few media personalities like himself before being defeated by Fury in a split-decision (how could it have come to a split decision?). In a much-derided video, Paul smokes as he works out on a speed bag. That is a fair representation of his seriousness as a boxer and as a man. To say that he can “barely” fight is a generous assessment.

DeBoef says that boxers “have to be influencers as much as they are athletes.” He admits that you cannot turn an influencer into a boxer, but you can turn a boxer into an influencer. However, this is a transformation with consequences.

Although Haney has more boxing content to promote than Paul has, Haney has had to build his audience “far from the ring.” That’s a problem for boxing, since most what Haney promotes as an influencer is not boxing. It is instead his status as a rich man with many cars, female stars around him (he is now married), and jewelry. He cannot promote the hard work he began at seven, when he started to learn to box, or his father’s financial security, which allowed Haney to develop his career in Mexico, where he had ten of his first 15 fights. In Mexico he and his father also built Haney’s media presence—that’s no ordinary boxer’s dad, by the way—and prepared him for his financial success (both below).

Boxers for decades have flaunted their money, jewelry, cars, drinking, and dating, those being the rewards of their success in the ring. Those benefits mean more for Haney and the other boxer-influencers, however. For them, money and bling are marketing tools for getting followers, the means to building the stars’ brands.

Looking ahead: boxing and UFC

YASM will change both boxers and boxing. Soon, if not already, the influenced will influence the influencers. The influenced are consumers. They have to be marketed to; as that happens, their power will grow. What happens if they turn on their idol? Haney is philosophical, saying that his fans love him one day and hate him the next. All that matters to him, an egoist in the mold of Donald Trump, is that people talk about him (to be fair, he says that he also cares about his family and his fight record).

But let’s think about boxing rather than boxers. Can boxing change? Sports writer Scott Carasik has listed “8 Reasons the UFC Will Always Be Better Than Boxing” (Bleacher Report). If there are others who think the way he does, we might see a convergence of boxing and Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) that will be promoted by YASM.

UFC is unified and solid. It is an American mixed martial arts promotion company owned and operated by Zuffa, which subsidiary of Endeavor Group Holdings. It is a tight organization.

In contrast, as Carasik points out, boxing lacks a top-down structure. Boxing has the World Boxing Association (WBA), World Boxing Council (WBC), World Boxing Organization (WBO), and the 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.”

But fans care less about administrative transparency than they do about action.

Carasik identifies several areas in which UFC is better for its fans than boxing is for boxing fans. They are revealing. 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 Christians being fed to lions, men getting clubbed to death, and other fun sights?)

In addition, UFC’s 5 5-minute rounds are more challenging than boxing’s 12 3-minute rounds. The 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.” Because it is centralized, UFC has a clear hierarchy of fighters. There no ducking matches; champions are forced to defend their titles or lose them. The endless scheming and match-on/match-off dramas of boxing don’t exist in UFC.

Carasik does not discuss social media, but it’s clear that UFC offers 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,” he writes 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 . . . .” Note “casual” there—that’s the YA audience, averse to “boring matches” and “goofy scoring.”

UFC is faster, bloodier, and easy to understand. Setting aside the small numbers of boxers and traditional (not casual) boxing fans, we might wonder if those who follow boxing will soon be looking for the kind of action Carasik describes.

Haney is a good example of a boxer who gives his fans what they want—an influencer who feeds his followers bravado, wealth, sex appeal, a racist edge, and, not to be forgotten, an undefeated record. Will a new generation of boxers take the next step and begin to work for changes in the boxing platform, modifying some rules, such as the length or number of rounds, or permitting new moves and punches? Will YASM change boxing by simplifying it and making it more like MAA?

Carasik says that UFC will “always” be better than boxing, but that “always” supposes that boxing will never change. What if just one of its divisions begins to entertain a new form, a hybrid of boxing and MMA that makes boxing more competitive?

Boxing is deeply traditional, with young boxers looking back to great boxers from the past. UFC has no such traditions, even though Mixed Martial Arts are of course very old. Young adults are not interested in tradition. The ultimate GenZ-YA experience is one that is all about the follower. That’s the genius of YASM: those who pay for it think that they are the ones who profit. It’s the same with people who think that Facebook and other platforms are free of cost, although the platforms combine and monetize user data, selling it to advertizers who then aim ads at you.