By Clark Hoyt from The New York Times
Larry Merchant, a former newspaper sports writer and editor who now comments on boxing on HBO, recently wrote to Tom Jolly, the sports editor of The Times, to protest the paper’s relative lack of coverage of boxing.
Merchant’s letter and Jolly’s reply provide a fascinating glimpse into issues that transcend the immediate question of whether The Times should devote resources to a sport that even an ardent admirer like Merchant acknowledges is no longer mainstream. In many ways, Merchant and Jolly are discussing the role of a general interest newspaper in a dramatically changed world.
I thought readers would be interested in their exchange. Here it is, Merchant first, then Jolly, then a reply from Merchant:
I’m writing to protest The Times’s policy on boxing. It virtually ignores the sport.
I do not long for the good old days of boxing. I long for present day coverage that acknowledges that it still exists and occasionally flourishes.
True enough, boxing is no longer mainstream. Yet it has a devoted following that 6 to 10 times a year reaches beyond that. Big fights generate big numbers: crowds, TV ratings, pay-per-view dollars.In contrast to the Times, even the Wall Street Journal covers major events, and another national newspaper, USA Today, covers those and other significant fights. The Post and the Daily News also follow fighters of local interest.
Horse racing is no longer mainstream either, but The Times routinely provides extensive coverage of high-profile races.
The author Tom Hauser, who writes for an online boxing site, recently examined The Times’s sports pages during July, August and September. He found, among other curiosities, just four bylined articles on boxing — three on women in boxing in the coming Olympics and in India, and an apparent rewrite of a press release announcing a tournament on Showtime.
During that period, the Times ignored the comeback of Floyd Mayweather, Jr., the top American fighter, vs. Juan Manuel Lopez, the lightweight champion regarded as one of the best fighters in the world, which was bought in over a million homes. And it ignored the top American heavyweight prospect, Chris Arreola, attempting to become the first heavyweight of Mexican descent to win a heavyweight title vs. Vitali Klitschko, one of the famous Klitschko brothers who have dominated the division in the 2000s, which pulled the highest rating on HBO this year.
Earlier, The Times ignored Shane Mosley, one of the best fighters of his time, challenging welterweight champion Antonio Margarito before the largest crowd of any event ever at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, and the subsequent suspension of Margarito for trying to load his gloves before the fight. And at Madison Square Garden, the paper ignored Miguel Cotto, a very popular fighter in New York, vs. titlist Joshua Clottey of the Bronx.
In July the Times ran multiple Associated Press briefs to record the tragic coincidence of violent deaths, by suicide or murder, of three notable prize fighters: Alex Arguello, an all-time great who was the mayor of Managua, Nicaragua; Arturo Gatti of Jersey City, one of the most celebrated fighters of modern times, and junior welterweight champion and ex-Olympian Vernon Forrest. One would have thought that a Times columnist or feature writer would have addressed and celebrated these passings.
Sports editor Tom Jolly told Hauser he has been to one prize fight in his life. His disinterest is palpable in the sports pages of the Times. I mentioned an article about a tournament on Showtime. Just Saturday former champion Jermain Taylor met an outstanding German, Arthur Abraham, in the first fight of that super middleweight tournament. It did not even get into the agate results of the Times. I doubt that Jolly knows, much less cares, that the last American Gold Medalist, Andre Ward, will fight the highest-ranked fighter in that class, Mikkel Kessler, next month.
Jolly did say that the Times will staff the Manny Pacquiao-Cotto match in November. Pacquiao is an Ali-like figure in the Philippines who was recently cited by Time magazine as one of t the 100 most influential people in the world. This will be Pacquiao’s 10th big fight in the U.S. That’s how long it took for The Times to discover him.
The Times is rightly celebrated for its mission to cover all the news. Its failure to recognize that boxing still resonates with many fans and readers, if not as many as before, seems personal and capricious. You should rethink this policy.
Dear Larry,
Your latest email leaves me with a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t feeling. You say we don’t care about boxing and that when we do write about it, our stuff is lousy or late. Tough crowd!
Seriously, let me try to set the record straight on a few points.
1. If my news judgment is based on my attendance at events, I’m going to be spending a lot of time out of the office and, frankly, I’m going to be exhausted. Honestly, I just don’t get that as a fair measure of interest. Yes, I’ve only gone to one prizefight, but I’ve spent money to watch a number of pay-per-view fights; do I get any credit for that? I haven’t gone to a baseball game all season; but I did go to a WNBA game. Does that mean I’m uninterested in baseball and very interested in the WNBA? I’ve attended the Indy 500 five times, but never been to a Nascar race; do you see that reflected in our coverage?
2. You say that the Times ignored a number of big bouts, but as I explained in our last exchange on this subject, nearly all of them occurred late at night and, if they finished in time to make it into any papers, it was only for the last run. Most bouts are on Saturday night and our final edition for the national edition goes to press at 11 p.m. The final local edition closes at 12:30. The most noteworthy of the fights were included in briefs for those last papers, and all of the results appeared in our wire feed on nytimes.com/sports. We — and by that I mean the collective judgment of our senior editors — don’t believe it is in our best interest to send a reporter to an event for four or five days (the typical requirement for covering the pre- and post-fight story), when we can’t report on the actual event when it occurs. In other words, we’re being asked to send a reporter to, say, Las Vegas for four or five days to write about a fight that’s about to happen, and then write a follow in the Monday paper on a fight that occurred on Saturday night. We’re willing to do that if it’s a bout that transcends the core fan base, but there haven’t been many such fights since Mike Tyson, Lennox Lewis and Evander Holyfield passed their prime.
3. The notion that The Times covers “all the news” is a nice myth, but it is a myth. The Times used to publish all the shipping charts. The Times used to publish all the stock tables. The Times used to publish all the box scores from the NHL and NBA. Our world has changed, and we’ve changed with it. Our mission these days is to inform our readers about the most important and interesting news in sports, politics, business, foreign, national and local affairs.
4. Your reference to horse racing makes for a neat comparison with boxing. When the Triple Crown season rolls around, interest in horse racing grows exponentially beyond the usual fan base. But once that season ends, or the possibility of a Triple Crown winner ends, our coverage returns to minimal — except on issues related to the sport. Imagine, though, if there were three or four organizations that held competing races and that the top 3-year-olds were forbidden to race against each other because their organizations wouldn’t permit it. My guess is that people would quickly lose interest and our coverage would reflect that.
Boxing has three significant problems and none of them are a secret:
* There are no fighters that the general public is fascinated by, that have charisma, that transcend their sport. (Thomas Hauser suggested to me that if we wrote about more fighters, the public might care more about them. WNBA Commissioner Donna Orender tells me the same thing about her league. But, as I’m sure you know, it’s not our job to promote sports. And, Lord knows, boxing has plenty of promoters.)
* Few fights are available for viewing by the general public. They’re on cable or on pay-per-view and they’re on the air at 11 p.m. Eastern or later.
* The alphabet soup chaos of sanctioning bodies makes it next to impossible for people to identify the real champion and to compare how the fighters within a weight class compare at any given moment.
We’re watching the Showtime tournament to see if it’s a sign that things might start to change. But, let’s be honest, Taylor is clearly past his prime and the other fighters on Saturday were Abraham, Carl Froch and Andre Dirrell — not exactly household names.
All of which brings me back to the mission of The Times. We understand that people are passionate about certain sports. As I mentioned, I hear from the WNBA commissioner, but I also hear from horse racing fans, hockey fans, lacrosse fans, Yankees fans, Mets fans and every other kind of fan who thinks we’ve done wrong to their team or sport.
The truth is we’ve moved beyond the days when event coverage was our main purpose. In this cable/Internet age, most people who care about an event learn about it well before our paper arrives at their doorstep. They can also go to one of the many Web sites that specialize in particular sports.
Our goal is to tell readers something they don’t know, either through a news story on an issue or development that isn’t yet known to the general public, or, when news is well known, to explain why or how it happened.
Each of those decisions involves value judgments: Is this something the vast majority of our audience will care about? If not, is it something they would care about it if they understood it better? Is the information we can provide going to be better than what the wire service can provide? (In the case of many games or sports events, we think the wires can do just fine and that we will serve our readers better by assigning our reporters to do more in-depth reporting on something else.)
I hope you’ll enjoy our Manny Pacquiao story. We think it’s going to be quite good, even if it’s a bit late for your taste.
I continue to enjoy your work on HBO and look forward to watching Pacquiao-Cotto. Should be quite a show.
Best,
Tom
Merchant later answered Jolly. Here is an excerpt:
Tom,
Thanks for your prompt response to my beef with your boxing policy. Unfortunately I feel that you countered with more rationalization than reason.Re time restraints: I notice that baseball playoff games ran well toward midnight. Night matches at the U.S. Open often go beyond that. You still cover them. If you want to cover an event you cover it.
Re charisma: True, we don’t have any Alis, Foremans, Tysons or Leonards today. But we had Delahaoya for most of this decade, and my recollection is that the Times was absent for many of his big fights.
Re multi-champions in the same division: It can be aggravating and confusing, but there’s a collective wisdom in boxing that knows the true champion as opposed to title-holders). The rankings of Ring Magazine and Dan Rafael (ESPN.com) reflect the consensus. More important, there have always been so-called “paper champions” and fans have always decided which fighters they wanted to see, champions or not.
Big and important fights are to boxing what the Triple Crown is to racing, the majors to golf and tennis, the Tour de France to cycling, etc. Sold out arenas, TV ratings and pay-per-view numbers matter in boxing not because they mean it’s as popular as it once was but that it still matters on some occasions.
Thanks for your time,
Larry Merchant