No Holds Barred: Charles Farrell Reviews Klitschko-Chagaev Fight and Awful State of Heavyweight Boxing

On this edition of No Holds Barred, host Eddie Goldman speaks with our colleague and correspondent, Charles Farrell.

In a spirited and lengthy discussion, we review Wladimir Klitschko's predictable TKO victory over Ruslan Chagaev on Saturday, June 20, in Germany in a fight for several alphabet heavyweight belts. We critique this fight and the performance of both fighters, as well as the entire woeful heavyweight division.

We also discuss the disgraceful state of boxing journalism today, and why we do not take seriously what we read in The Ring magazine, including their recognition of Wladimir Klitschko as their "heavyweight champion of the world". And we lament the danger both to fighter safety and public health that this fight entailed, since Chagaev had tested positive for the hepatitis B antigen, and would not have been allowed to fight in many countries.

But we also explain why we do see hope for boxing in many other weight divisions, and especially outside the U.S.

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Knockout Reporting

All you need do is search for the words “Obama knockout Clinton” in Google, and you will get a plethora of news articles and headlines comparing tonight’s Democratic primaries to a boxing match. We get them from coast to coast, and in print and online.

The New York Times reports, “Spending Heavily, Obama Attempts Knockout Blow.” MSNBC.com titles an AP article, “Obama seeks knockout, Clinton bids for revival.” The Honolulu Advertiser writes, “Final punches thrown before fateful voting.” By the time you could list them all, the primaries would be over.

These are not merely the product of cliché-mad writers having to grind out headlines day after day. They not only reflect the reality that boxing can be seen as a microcosm of life. What they signify is that interest in fighting, in struggle, in battles, is as high as ever. We also know that the same cannot be said about the sport of boxing, at least in the regions that the media obsessed with these primaries operate.

Yet most of these media outlets make little or no attempt to recognize the connection of boxing to the rest of life from the other side, and cover this universally compelling sport. The New York Times, for example, on the same day they were writing about Obama’s attempted “knockout blow,” had absolutely nothing about the previous night’s fight of the year candidate between Israel Vazquez and Rafael Marquez. All the news, indeed.

Part of the blame, alas, has to lie with the way boxing positions itself. Besides weekly bombastic cons that every televised fight will be a great one, little is done to connect the sport to the rest of life, save in a few unimaginative areas like appealing to crude nationalism, sentimentalism about dying relatives, or just cheap trash talk borrowed from the fake pro “wrestling”.

What parades itself as the boxing media follows in kind. It does not take a sizable budget or expense account to ask fighters more than just how they plan to beat their opponent or who is next. This sport is obviously completely different from those where you hit or throw a ball. What does it mean to these athletes to hit each other and get hit in return in this sport? We rarely ever find out.

The drama inherent in such a sport is incomparable to any that can be produced in the non-combat sports, at least in my estimation. While the clock ticking down in an intense, close game, or a full count with the bases loaded and the score tied in the ninth inning, might be entertaining to some (and it is at times to me), the stakes in those sports are entirely different from that in sports like boxing. A batter may strike out, a receiver may drop a pass, or a basketball player may miss a free throw, but those are all in different galaxy from getting knocked out.

I, for one, wouldn’t mind all these politicians knocking each other out, for real. I would settle for writing and reporting of the sporting knockouts which had the equivalent depth that the sport itself does. For that, just like we cannot rely on the politicians for anything other than passing gas, we have to go beyond what our lame, established boxing media is doing and produce it ourselves.