Tonight American sports fans can watch two separate boxing telecasts, one on Showtime Pay-Per-View, the other on HBO.
In the first, and by far the more heavily publicized, Mike Tyson seeks to continue his charade of a boxing career by beating up hopelessly-outclassed Kevin McBride, a fighter whose only qualification for heavyweight exposure is his 6'7" frame. I use the term "charade" because Tyson, despite his massive notoriety, hasn't beaten a significant heavyweight opponent in 14 years, was exposed as a loser by both Evander Holyfield and Lennox Lewis, and wouldn't have a prayer of exploiting a naive public for the tens of millions of dollars necessary to pay off his debts if he were to be matched against legitimate heavyweight contenders, all of whom would clean his clock. Viewers are paying to see a circus act, the appeal of which is based entirely on Tyson's tabloid train wreck of a life. (And I need to clearly establish here this is my own personal opinion, not the institutional opinion of HBO).
In the second, the 24-year-old Puerto Rican judged by many ring experts to be the best young star fighter in the sport, Miguel Cotto, takes on the man who beat him for the Olympic gold medal in Sydney five years ago, Uzbekistan's Muhammad Abdullaev. Both are contenders for big exposure and money fights in the competitively-richest weight class in the sport, 140 pounds, or in the language of boxing, junior welterweight. Cotto is in the process of inheriting the glorious legacy of Puerto Rican boxing from the glamorous but now fading Felix Trinidad, and the fight takes place in Madison Square Garden before a passionate and mostly Puerto Rican crowd on the eve of the city's Puerto Rican Day parade. The undercard features at least two fights which could figure significantly into the sport's legitimate competitive picture.
So where will every single major daily newspaper boxing writer in the country be working tonight? At the circus. That's where their so-called sports editors sent them. Their defense, of course, is that audience response dictates editorial policy. "Our readers are interested in Tyson, and they don't know who Cotto and Abdullaev are." Well, no wonder.
It's a damned shame that the misdeeds over the years of boxing's promoters and so-called regulators have given the public license to doubt the integrity of the sport, because it debilitates the case for more media integrity in return. It's difficult to demand that editors honor the legitimacy of a sport whose legitimacy has legitimately been in question. But the fact is, editors who sent their boxing writers to Washington instead of New York this weekend dishonored sport in favor of pure personality. If sports editors won't be aware or responsible enough to help lead their readers toward what is real and away from what is unreal in sports, they aren't really behaving as sports editors at all. They hung skilled, serious boxing writers out to dry.
It's not politics, but it is another example of the wearying shallowness and amorality of conventional media in America. Sometimes the marketplace elevates, sometimes it degrades, and editors in every department ought to able to observe the difference. Otherwise they might as well work on Page Six.