By: Sean Crose
With the end of live professional boxing on standard television, many fans believe the sport is now at a place where it can’t come back from. Don’t tell tell Terence Crawford about such beliefs though. The undisputed welterweight champ turned Canelo Alvarez opponent thinks it’s a good thing that boxing is having to change its ways, particularly when it comes to the old pay-per-view model. “We can get back to that,” Crawford told Dan Rafael, referring to a time where watching a major fight didn’t cost a major amount of dollars. “I think boxing will be back where it used to be back in the day.”
Here’s hoping. The truth is that Crawford will be fighting Canelo next month in a true super fight. What makes it even more enticing than the two fighters involved is the fact that the fight will be aired on Netflix with no additional charge. Is it the way for the future? Crawford certainly seems to think so. No doubt a great many fans hope he’s right. Although Netflix charges a fee, it’s nothing like the costs thrown upon fans for major fights over the past decade and a half. It’s hard to imagine the large prices presented to fans as not having had a bad impact on the sport. People don’t watch boxing like they used to? Well, it cost a fortune to watch. American fans don’t know any big name fighters? That’s because they can’t afford to watch them. These may not be the only problem boxing has but they’re two big ones.
What’s more, Netflix is showing that fans will flock to see a fight…so I long as it’s a fight they would be interested in seeing to begin with. Mike Tyson versus Jake Paul and Katie Taylor versus Amanda Serrano brought in millions upon millions of eyeballs to the streaming system over the past year. It’s hard to imagine Canelo – Crawford not being an enormous success in its own right.
Not that Crawford is entirely happy at the moment. He feels Canelo disrespected him when he put his resume under scrutiny “It definitely irritated me,” said Crawford, “because, I can say so much about his resume and the guys he has fought, at the time he fought, and so forth. But. I am not gonna do that. I’d rather talk about him as a fighter and forget all the other people he fought before me.”
Bad blood can bring in a large viewership for a fight as well.
