Keep up your annoyance at things like Mario Barrios vs Manny Pacquiao; it’s our only way out
I don’t love Max Gladstone’s Last Exit as much as I do his previous solo novel, Empress of Forever; as much as I’m a sucker for deep, intimate dives into characters’ psyches, too many such indulgences take a toll on the pacing, which feels inappropriate for a story whose heroes travel via muscle car.
That said, it’s got one hell of a hook: the protagonists, former college friends Getting the Band Back Together ten years after a disastrous adventure saw one of their number consumed by the gnawing void beyond time and space, discovered the ability to manipulate reality and explore alternate versions of it through weaponized uncertainty. The catch is that every one they visit is, in some capacity, worse than our version of it. This is Liebniz’s best of all possible worlds; change any variable and the result will inevitably fall short of expectations.
That’s not unfamiliar territory for boxing fans, who’ve seen countless would-be “disruptors” sputter out and slip beneath the wheels of the sport’s ancient but inexorable hegemony. Triller’s explosive start gave way to a comical fall from grace that barely left an impact crater. The promise of subscription services replacing the pay-per-view model has slowly proven itself hollow, with yearly prices rising and the largest events still locked behind one-time paywalls.
The Turki Alalshikh Experience, the most promising swerve in recent memory, is showing cracks. It is and always has been a vanity project at its heart; Alalshikh is his own target audience, showing little interest in building a sound foundation for boxing’s return to prominence. This month’s infamous weekend trilogy made that abundantly clear, with Alalshikh renting out Times Square but blocking it off from the public (which, admittedly, wound up being in the public’s best interest).
I know writers who use subtext and they’re all cowards.
I think often of the final paragraph of Jon Bois’ criminally underrated There is No Future of Baseball, the seedbed from which bloomed 17776:
NASA believes Pioneer 10 still exists, far beyond the realms of night and day. The rocket gave it a little spin that day in 1972, a spin it probably has to this day, moving from back to belly every few seconds, basking in an eternal, beautiful present.
Baseball, in Bois’ eyes, has reached its perfect state. Tweak it all you like; regression to the mean is inevitable. Where baseball has achieved a personal nirvana, however, boxing remains stuck in eternal samsara, always striving to break free of its impurities but unable to shift their unbearable weight.
It doesn’t help that those with the levers to do so are disinclined to do so, and I don’t just mean the major promoters. Consider Manny Pacquiao’s upcoming comeback against Mario Barrios, which runs headlong into every moral and ethical hurdle you put in its path.
- Pacquiao has not boxed professionally in four years and looked awful in his 2024 exhibition against kickboxer Rukiya Anpo.
- Barrios has not fought a single mandatory challenger since winning the title in 2023, instead fighting the underwhelming Fabian Maidana and a competent-but-struggling Abel Ramos.
- Barrios currently has a mandatory challenger in Souleymane Cissokho, who controversially edged out Egidijus Kavaliauskas earlier this month.
- WBC regulations stipulate that any challenger must be ranked in the top 15. In a cartoonishly brazen move, they simply added Pacquiao to the rankings post-hoc in what I like to call the Gilberto Mendoza Special.
Any self-respecting media ecosystem would be eating Mauricio Sulaiman alive for this. It should be very easy to speak truth to power when said power can’t retaliate with anything more than harsh language.
Unfortunately, our industry isn’t immune to the twin plagues of access journalism and media capture. Big-name journalists either won’t push Sulaiman for fear of him taking his ball and going home or can’t do so for fear of executive pushback; much like how billionaires took over the Washington Post and L.A. Times and clamped down on editorial independence, Alalshikh purchased not just The Ring but the Twitter account of aggregator Michael Benson, while ProBox snapped up BoxingScene.
Frankly, we’re on our own and don’t have many weapons at our disposal besides our wallets. Powerful, yes, but rarely capable of sending a precise message. Skipping a PPV doesn’t send the organizers a receipt detailing your support for the matchmaking but displeasure at the predatory business practices at play.
The instinctive reaction is to just roll with it. This crap has always been here and will continue to be here until people decide to stop concussing each other for money. But you can’t let your skin get so thick that you don’t notice the next cut. Settle for less and they’ll only give you less. Never stop demanding better.
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