Wednesday, May 15, 2013
SI: The 50 highest-earning athletes
(sportsillustrated.cnn.com)
posted 4 days ago by RoyalsRetro (AG#1F) to adrian gonzalez, albert pujols, alex rodriguez, alfonso soriano, barry zito, boxing, c.c. sabathia, carl crawford, cole hamels, derek jeter, felix hernandez, golf, joe mauer, joey votto, justin verlander, mark teixiera, matt cain, matt kemp, miguel cabrera, nba, nfl, prince fielder, roy halladay, ryan howard, salaries, tim lincecum, vernon wells, yankees, zack greinke
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Read More...When welterweight Floyd Mayweather was No. 1 on Sports Illustrated’s Fortunate 50 last year—knocking out Tiger Woods, who had been No. 1 every year since SI started producing the list in 2004—it looked like a fluke, the result of the $85 million he received for his fights with Victor Ortiz and Miguel Cotto. Now Mayweather is proving that he belongs at the top. From just two bouts this year, one earlier this month and the other scheduled for September, he will earn at least $90 million, ...
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Page 62 of 79 pages
‹ First < 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 > Last ›I agree with all of this.
I'm not even sure how one would measure that. Stipulated that it isn't written about in Sports Illustrated, or by the Plimptons and Mailers of 2013, as much or as lovingly as it used to be.
But boxing isn't close to "dead." As virtually every form of entertainment has become a niche fashion, boxing has more than maintained a dedicated and profitable niche. Celebrities and high rollers pay big money to sit ringside at the big fights, purses continue to grow, and PPV at $50 a pop still attracts hundreds of thousands if not millions of buys. It isn't the cultural phenomenon it was in Louis's or Ali's heyday, but I'm not sure that's what we're measuring here.
If you want to deny that boxing in America hasn't declined in popularity, then we're just going to have to agree to disagree. To me it's just an obvious fact of life.
The UFC is much less about repeated head trauma than boxing is.
I'm not sure I'm "denying" it as opposed to wondering about the measurements being used to prove it.
Every year around World Series time, we hear baseball's declining TV ratings being hand-waved away because of the multiplicity of new entertaiment vehicles we have today. Isn't that basically the same thing that's happened to boxing? It's not as though no one watches or goes to boxing matches anymore; it's just that the fights and the fighters have become buried under the cacophony of modern entertainment options.
Boxing isn't the everyday content provider you need for shelf space on ESPN and talk radio or, for that matter, Sports Illustrated. So it looks like it's lost a huge chunk of "mainstream" appeal because it isn't being blabbed about constantly by the blabbermouths of 2013. But that could be just an illusion. De La Hoya/Mayweather did 2.5M PPV buys at $50 a pop. What other sporting event could do that?
Asking, not arguing ...
What else would even be eligible to compare to something like that? Obviously the Super Bowl would destroy the PPV number if it was allowed to be sold as a stand-alone affair and not part of a greater TV package. It seems like your contenders to breaking those PPV numbers have the rights bundled as part of a greater rights deal. Boxing is rather unique in that you have two "independent contractors" that face off against one another, mostly outside any construct of a league, tournament, etc.
That's not to argue your point; there might not be a big list of events that could do more than 2.5M buys. At the same time, I have no idea how to compare that to other sporting events.
My guess would be that the demographics of boxing fans has changed dramatically over the past 25 years. But that might not necessarily mean that the profitability of the sport has changed at all.
I agree with this. There may be individuals whose latent racism (or whatever) causes a reduction in interest, but overall? I, too, am skeptical.
On the boxing front, I do think the audience has changed from a more general one to a more niche one, though I can't begin to tell you how I'd demonstrate that empirically. But Jose may have hit on the root causes: poor organization of the sport as a whole. When I was a kid, it was easy for me to follow: everyone seemed to consider the Heavyweight division to be the "premier" division, and (at the time) Ali was the champ.
But even then, there were issues with different organizations holding contests for different belts, weren't there? (Genuinely asking; I just remember Ali mentioning it in Superman vs. Muhammad Ali.) There seem to be a bazillion different weight classes, and having all the big fights be on pay-per-view doesn't help, either.
That's not to say boxing should change to suit me, you understand. If boxing is financially healthy -- and it sure sounds like it is -- then they'd be nuts to adjust to my whims. But in my single, solitary case the move away from boxing coincided pretty much with the move to expensive pay-per-view fights.
It's pretty easy to demonstrate: NBC aired a weekly prime time boxing show for 14 years, from 1946 to 1960. According to Wikipedia, at one point there were six boxing shows on in prime time.
Football will always connect to the vast middle and upper class public through the college game, and the less white the NFL has become the more popular it's become. There have been so many teams with all-black starting units for so long now that nobody even pays attention to it. Compare that to the fuss when such lineups first appeared in baseball and basketball.
But boxing is different. Tom points out the number of prime time boxing shows that were being shown in television's early years, and television was actually the factor that initiated boxing's decline, as it killed off the live audience for the nearly infinite number of local and club matches that served as the minor leagues for the big events at Gardens and the Stadiums. Even being the state or local champ was once considered a big deal, but the combination of TV and changing demographics has pretty much killed boxing in the U.S. as anything but a niche sport, MMA ratings and PPV sales aside. The many ethnic groups that once saw boxing as a way of escape from poverty and dead end jobs have been mostly replaced by foreign boxers, whose connections to the U.S. audience are strictly limited.
This begs the question of what sports aren't niche sports today. Baseball certainly is. About the only one that isn't is football.
Ask a hundred people on the street to name a current heavyweight boxer, and cross off all the people who say "Muhammad Ali" or "George Foreman" or whatever.
And they all would have said Mike Tyson five years ago and been right. The heavyweight champ today is a boring foreigner -- a white Eastern Euro, no less. How many times has he fought in the US? Five?
Unless Roy Jones Jr. is still a thing then I can't do it.
I think there is some truth to this. What I think will happen is that flag football will be a viable option for longer than it is today, and contact football will be increasingly marginalized.
In Texas, I see a certain segment of upper-middle-class+ parents steering their kids to lacrosse vs. football. Similar skill sets required to excel, with less violent contact. We are a long, long way away from middle-class or lower-class families not letting their kids play football in Texas, Oklahoma, Florida, etc.
My own older son plays flag football and loves it--it will be a battle with him once he is old enough to play contact football. He'll want to do it. He has the size and speed to excel, but a) there is too much not known about long-term effects for us to be comfortable allowing him to play and b) even if Pop Warner-type football is not where the injuries occur on average, I'm not worried about averages--I am worried about my own kid. Clearly, there is a bigger extreme trauma downside risk in football than in most other activities we could put him in.
Kwame Harris being outed after an arrest for domestic violence against an ex-boyfriend.
http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/nfl-shutdown-corner/kwame-harris-former-49ers-raiders-offensive-lineman-arrested-213622387--nfl.html
"These two Super Bowl teams are playing very, very well right now."
Two teams who have survived a sudden death tournament to play for the championship are playing very, very well? You don't say...
The lack of a video for the Mekons' "He Beat Up His Boyfriend" troubles me.
Is this about where people on this board have ended up? That he was duped, told some lies throughout to hide the fact that he hadn't met her, and then lied at the end out of embarrassment?
Yes, but I also pretty much started there. I think he told some lies along the way (clearly including lying to his father--I'm sure he's the first son to ever do that!), but much of what he did publicly was fail to correct misperceptions. E.g., when asked by SI when he met Lennay, he answered, "She saw me at [whatever game it was]."
Yes, I can go along with something like this.
The money quote:
Depends which era we're talking about, I guess, and what specific aspect of "greatness" is at play.
How many people have the baseball package or the football package?
If boxing could get a prime time slot on a major network, they would jump at the chance.
He's not even the best WR that's played for the 49ers.
I'm not seeing why playing for the same team as Rice did means Moss is not in the running.
Yes. Moss is not in the discussion because there is no discussion. In the same way that if we asked who was the best position player of the last 25 years, the debate would begin and end with Barry Bonds.
Moss is in the conversation for No. 2. It's his on talent (and probably peak), though his spotty year-to-year performance record pushes him down into the mix.
It's near impossible to top Jerry Rice in length. He was an excellent player in his 19th season. That's absurd in any sport but golf (and even then difficult).
*Interesting piece of trivia to me about that record. The #2 (at the time) receiving yards in a season total was set by Isaac Bruce in the same year that Rice set the record. So for Bruce it was "congratulations, you are #2 in the all-time record book, but not #1 this season." That's got to sting a little.
I believe there's a famous baseballer familar with this phenomenon.
Yeah, but we all remember that one. Football records are largely forgotten.
Yep, poor Dennis Eckersley.
Maybe Lewis requested these simply to enhance his dance.
The same thing happened to Brady with the passing yards record.
And he needs only a few more games to break Drew Brees' recently set consecutive TD record.
This begs the question of what sports aren't niche sports today. Baseball certainly is. About the only one that isn't is football.
A sport is not a "niche" sport if its championship games are telecast on broadcast networks; if a local team's entire schedule is available on the lowest non-basic tier of cable or satellite TV; and if the league's entire schedule is available at a small extra fee to fans anywhere in the country; or if in the case of individual sports, its tournaments and showcase events are telecast by a broadcast network.
A sport is a "niche" sport if its showcase events are available on PPV or HBO-level only; or if less than 10% of the population can name its current champion(s) or its most storied legends of the past 5 or 10 years.
Football is the most popular spectator sport by many measures, but that doesn't mean that baseball or basketball or golf or NASCAR are "niche" sports. They're broadly popular with a large segment of the population in a way** that boxing hasn't been since the 1950's, and in a way MMA has never been.
**In a way that also includes participation
Moss's QBs were:
Ancient Randall Cunningham, Jeff George, Dante Culpepper (4 years), 2 lost Raider Years, 3 years with Brady, 1 lost year, and 1 with Kaeper-Smith.
Rice's QBs were: 6 years Montana, 7 years Young, 2 years Jeff Garcia, and then 4 years lost Raider+etc. years.
That sort of has to be the crux of Moss' argument. But he's still 7K total yards and 5 YPG short of Rice.
We don't have targets (or catch rate) or DVOA (success rate) or EPA or anything going back past 2000 so there's only so much you can say, statistically.
Flacco has no argument. Well, maybe he could argue that he was hamstrung by a conservative Raven offense scheme his whole career. In which case he should in no way resign with Baltimore.
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