Last night or early this morning, depending on your timezone, we had ourselves a big boxing match. On Netflix, of all places. Canelo Alvarez vs Terence 'Bud' Crawford, a splashy marquee boxing matchup featuring two premier fighters. One in Crawford, who was punching above his weight class—two weight classes, actually—and another in Alvaraz, who has been the biggest and most successful Latin fighter in the world for a decade plus and seemed to be suddenly compelled to take on this fight by a whole lot of Saudi Arabia-backed money.
That Saudi money, along with martial arts' Wizard of Oz, Dana White, is part of this new era of boxing, meant to revive this allegedly dying sport. Maybe you heard Max Kellerman mention it in inappropriately fawning terms. As part of boxing's comeback, they had an over-the-top spectacle, not at a Vegas casino, but at Allegiant Stadium, right where the Raiders play what they think is football. It was big and ostentatious—every kind of annoying celebrity was there with a bonus Mark Wahlberg pre-fight assessment. The two fighters came out to an extravagant mariachi band performance as they walked down an elaborate LED screen tunnel that looked like something from the NFL draft.
I remember all of this because I was watching it around midnight, thinking surely the fight should be starting at any moment. Boxing does this a lot—they have a lot of pomp and circumstance and undercard fights that need time to shine, and because it's taking place in the Pacific time zone, there is a feeling that they have room to play around. Be fashionably late if you will. Sometimes the main card will start after 11 p.m. ET, sometimes it'll even start after midnight, but I cannot oblige what was essentially a 1 a.m. start time for viewers on the East Coast. That is wholly unfair to an entire segment of the audience.
I understand that this is rich coming from me, a man who had a second screen going to watch a pirate stream of Hawaii football at midnight. But this is not the anything goes prison yard of college football, this is a supposedly major sport that is allegedly being re-legitimized by puffier Joe Rogan and a rich billionaire class even more insane than the one we have in America. They used to write good reported pieces and profiles about this sport, it's supposed to be a serious endeavor. I'm sure White has all kinds of data about how the YouTubers and gamer kids that he loves having as a target audience appreciate the late start time or whatever, but you're not an underground punk band anymore, this is arena rock. Crawford would eventually defeat Alvarez by decision after 12 rounds in what felt like a match that mattered more to Crawford than to his opponent, but either way, we got a good fight for our troubles. When the inevitable rematch comes, here's hoping we get an earlier start time.
