The entry level to boxing is low and it hurts the sport.

For a while now i’ve seen through online interactions that the entry level to working in boxing is low and attracts all sorts of grafters who have no real passion for the sport but sport the usual unearned confidence and friendly smiles tinged with a hint of arrogance.

Again and again I see them walk into the sport with no qualifications and seemingly no real idea about the sport or its history and yet they get picked up and welcomed by unsurprisingly all the other grifters and grafters in boxing. A few months or years down the line we then seem them get exposed by someone as being a massive fraud who’s spent recent years treating people like shit behind the scenes.

This happens all the time and yet its the same reactions everytime, “wow he was such a nice guy” etc etc. They were never especially nice in the first place they just knew which people to suck up to and understand that being loud about a subject you know nothing about will get you further than being quiet and reasonable about a subject you know a lot about. The reason these people are aloud to worm themselves into the boxing community is because there is no entry level to get into the sport and a lot of the people that already work in the industry would be seen as jokes or frauds in other sporting businesses.

Unfortunately while we have a lot of talent in boxing at the moment we lack a good crop of writers that actually care about the sport and aren’t bitter and jaded. In recent years there have been less and less positions to cover boxing as the sport’s popularity in the mainstream audience has died down. I’ve written about this topic multiple times but every big event in boxing being put on PPV has hurt the sport perhaps irreparably combined with having no real structure which means the fighters that casual sports fans know don’t fight each other means boxing is mostly an afterthought in the sports world.

When you let unserious people work in boxing then you can’t expect people to take the sport seriously. The frauds that work in boxing never having to take accountability whether its a judge giving in bad score cards or a writer who’s bias and bitter towards certain fighters hurts boxing and if the sport is to grow to new heights these people have to be cut off.