Unlike Mayweather, Pacquiao Has Stepped Up & Carried the Sport

Thanks to Manny Pacquiao boxing is on the up and up and finally for the first time since Oscar De La Hoya was in the middle of his 147 pound championship reign in the late 1990’s boxing matters again and the sport owes it all to Manny Pacquiao.
Ever since he retired Oscar De La Hoya with an emphatic beat-down last year, his super-star status has increased exponentially on daily basis. And unlike most super-stars all of Pacquiao’s achievements are based on merit. He wasn’t a product of a marketing campaign or a recipient of favorable circumstances that helped cultivate his star status.
No, Pacquiao fought at the world class level for ten years and went through a trio of hall of famers in Marquez, Barrera, and Morales, and then when the opportunity presented itself he beat Oscar De La Hoya in a fight he was supposed to lose. Afterward he was still gracious in victory and told Oscar, “You will always be my idol.”
After the biggest victory of his career he didn’t rest on his laurels, he signed to fight Ricky Hatton, the linear junior-welterweight champion of the world, who had re-established his-self after the loss to Mayweather with solid wins over Juan Lazcano and Paul Malignaggi.
Again Pacquiao stunned the experts by making the difficult task of beating Ricky Hatton look easy. And if his victory over De La Hoya baited casual sports fans into taking a look at this little fighter from the Philippines, his knockout performance over Hatton hooked them in.
If you would have told me two years ago, that Manny Pacquiao, a 5’6 130 pound fighter from the Philippines who spoke English as a second language would achieve super-star status and bring the sport back to heights it hasn’t seen in years, I wouldn’t have believed it. In fact I would probably have given you 1000-1 odds that it wouldn’t happen.
Everything in this twenty-first century multi-media linked society is star driven. The NBA realized this in the early eighties when they marketed the Larry Bird-Magic Johnson rivalry.
Then David Stern, in all his flair for promotion, further embraced the idea of a star-driven league with the commercialization of Michael Jordan and the stars of the 1990s.
More recently, the NBA has invested heavily into the promotion of Lebron James as the league’s new poster-child, cognizant of the public’s propensity to become enamored with individuals whose talents exceed the standards set by the best in their particular field.
Why would the NBA deviate from this formula when it has been so pertinent to its growth to where today basketball is occupying a position right next to soccer as one of the planet’s universal past times.
Boxing doesn’t have a powerful centralized authority like the NBA that can execute a massive marketing campaign and change the sport’s trajectory.
And sometimes this lack of a centralized power can be a good thing. It certainly was when Jack Johnson was allowed to fight and win the heavyweight title almost forty years before Jackie Robinson was able to play a major league baseball game, but it’s not good when the different entities that run the sport aren’t able to pool their resources together in order to a establish the type of marketing plan necessary for it to be mainstream, and not just a peripheral sport.

And on American shores that’s what boxing has been the last six or seven years because without a concerted effort to market it on a broad scale, boxing has to depend on its stars to garner the public’s attention and keep it in the lime-light along the side of the other major sports that are successfully marketed by organizations such as the NFL, MLB, and the NBA.
Until Pacquiao’s recent rise to super-stardom, the sport didn’t have a star that had been embraced by the American public who was willing to fulfill those responsibilities.
Almost since its infancy, prize fighting has usually provided the masses with at least one star that transcends its confines and acts as the sports unofficial ambassador.

In the late 19th century prize fighting was illegal in the United States until John L. Sullivan’s popularity legitimatized it in even the most elite social circles.
In fact Theodore Roosevelt was so enamored with John L’s exploits that he became a lifelong boxing fan and advocated it as a means to engage in physical activity, and would regularly challenge members of the New York Police Department to sparring matches.
Then again after the establishment took reactionary measures against boxing after Jack Johnson’s ascension to the heavyweight throne, Jack Dempsey came along and took the sport’s world by storm and reinvigorated boxing.
His bout with French war hero Georges Carpentier in 1921 drew over ninety thousand fans to New Jersey which created boxing’s first million dollar gate and was the first event ever to be nationally broadcasted to home radio sets.
There after charismatic stars from Joe Louis to Muhammad Ali to Sugar Ray Leonard to Oscar De La Hoya kept boxing in the public’s eye by participating in big fights which were huge sporting events that served as a medium for introducing new fans to the grandest of sports.
A lot of people might say that one person can’t carry a sport, but look at golf. Where would it be without Tiger Woods? It certainly wouldn’t be as publicized as it is today. And as a result its revenues and fan base wouldn’t be growing.
It’s evident looking at boxing through an international paradigm that regional stars have been the catalyst for the global boxing boom.
Before his victory over De La Hoya Manny Pacquiao’s heroic march through boxing’s best fighters had already fostered a seemingly lasting interest in the sport in the Philippines and guys like Lucian Bute of Canada and Anthony Mundine of Australia brought boxing to the forefronts of sporting news in their respective countries. Even the boxing renaissance in Germany was first sparked by an Olympic star in Henry Maske.
So before Pacquiao became the face of boxing, why wasn’t there a star to carry the sport to the masses in the early part of the twenty-first century?
Well there was. After the Hatton fight, it was Mayweather’s time to carry the sport and assume the role as boxing’s superstar and he didn’t step up. Unlike Floyd, Manny has lived up to his super-star billing and has represented the sport in an honorable fashion by fighting the best, putting on exciting performances, and acting with dignity and humbleness in a way that seems genuine.
And I have been Mayweather guy the entire way and have rated him as the best fighter in the world since Roy Jones struggled with Tarver in their first fight in the fall of 2003 and still favor him over Pacquiao, but the bottom line is Mayweather never embraced the responsibility associated with being the symbol of the sport like Manny Pacquiao has.
Notes:
Favorite Quote: - The famed fight publicist Irving Rudd once made a comment about “Young writers and their sentimental stories of boxing men who would have stolen pennies off the eyes of a dead man!”