Our sport business columnist on boxing’s Queensberry v Matchroom showdown and the difficulty of sewing a team element into intodividual sports. Would you pay good money to see boxing promoters Frank Warren and Eddie Hearn square up in the ring? Perhaps last weekend’s evening of bouts between fighters in their respective Queensberry and Matchroom stables in Riyadh whetted your appetite. Warren’s boxers enjoyed a clean sweep in a five-versus-five event that – this a sport never short of hyperbole – was billed as “unprecedented”.
He’d be giving away 28 years to the younger man should they ever choose to get it on themselves. Not sure what a weigh-in would reveal though. Boxing is one of those sports that is quintessentially individual.
It’s an age-old truism that once you’re inside the ropes you are on your own. Stick a team into the ring and you’d have a brawl, or some confected version of tag-team all-in wrestling. There are team-based contests though.
Forces Fight Night, for example, sees the three main services in the armed forces contest 10 bouts. The army retained its Inter Services title in Aldershot back in March. Meanwhile, Oxford and Cambridge have had 115 annual scraps, the Light Blues’ recent win giving them a slender three-victory advantage over the history of this varsity battle.
Sewing a sport for the one into a narrative of the collective is an extremely delicate exercise and can prove an expensive, not to say embarrassing, failure. Athlet.
