If you include as sports anything that is covered by sports writers and is often reported in sports sections, then we can retire this thread right now. Hands down, it is hot dog eating contests. Yes, they are covered by sports writers, one of them actually listed one of the winners as one of ten test best athletic accomplishments of the year. An activity that is extremely unhealthful and rubs it in the faces of billions of people in the world who don’t get enough to eat. Apparently it qualifies as a sport in the minds of some because of the great physical effort needed to stuff meat down your throat, and the tolerance for pain as your GI tract becomes bloated. The only “sport” offhand I know that is sicker is shooting deer by clicking on the internet. Yes, there really are internet sites that allow you to kill animals remotely through the internet. At least there have been, maybe they have finally been banned.
I don’t agree completely on boxing. AdH is right that the sport is a mess now, there are too many championships in every division, and the sport is set up so that the best fighters in a division often may not meet each other (Exhibit A: Pacquiao and Mayweather). In other sports the best have to compete head to head or team to team with the best. In boxing that is not the case, because matches are determined by money, building a fighter’s career with relatively easy matches, how well rival promoters get along with each other, and many other factors. And of course the sport is violent, many ex-boxers have serious brain damage. I agree there are a lot of strikes against it.
OTOH, boxing arguably requires a high level of more skills than any other sport: speed, strength/power, endurance, agility, awareness, hand-eye-coordination, courage, pain tolerance. Virtually any general ability you can name that is associated with some sport is demanded by boxing. There is almost no other sport that requires all these skills, certainly not the major ones like baseball, football (U.S. or Euro), basketball, hockey, let alone cycling. Some very good boxers may get by without being really accomplished in some of these skills, but the cream of the crop have all of them, and they are all on full display when they perform. The only possible athletic factors boxing lacks that I can think of are a) it is an individual sport so one does not have to harmonize with teammates; b) matches are always in a temperature-controlled environment, so weather is not a factor; and c) weight divisions mean that an athlete doesn’t have to overcome major disadvantages in size (though Manny Pacquiao is fighting and destroying men who weigh 15-20 pounds more than he does when they get in the ring; and in the heavyweight division, matches may occur between fighters who differ by as much as fifty pounds and more than six inches of height).
And make no mistake about this: Pacquiao certainly is on a par with Leonard, Hagler, Hearns, etc. He is probably one of the top ten best of all time. Not only does he have all the skills, but he an unusually aggressive, offensive-minded fighter who is not afraid to take risks in the ring. He holds titles in an unprecedented eight different divisions, and while it’s true that a world title is not what it used to be, it’s very clear that Pacquiao could beat anyone competing in any of those divisions. In the past three years he hasn’t even had a close fight, out of something like sixty plus rounds, only one or two were given to his opponent by all three judges. That is dominance that is virtually unprecedented in boxing history.
And Mayweather, though much more cautious and defensive-minded, might be among the best all-time, too, except that he won’t take the fights that would allow him to prove this. Every skill that boxing requires that is quantifiable--speed, strength, endurance, e.g.—has shown steady improvement over time, as shown in the performances of Olympic athletes in events like sprinting, distance running, shot put, etc. In light of that, it would be very hard to argue that today’s best boxers are not faster, stronger, and more enduring than their predecessors (how much of this is due to doping, of course, and how much to superior training techniques, is another question).
If people can’t name any boxers, it’s because they don’t follow the sport, and that is in large part because there are no decent American heavyweight contenders. Most Americans are mostly interested in American boxers of the heavyweight class. A major reason there are no major American players at the heavyweight class is because any large man of uncommon athletic ability can make more money with less effort and pain in other sports like football, baseball and basketball. I always thought Shaquille O’Neal, who towers over even the Klitschko brothers and is uncommonly quick for someone his size, would have made a great heavyweight champion—then again, he lost to Oscar de la Hoya, nearly two feet shorter and literally half his size, which tells you how difficult it is to become a really good boxer.
There are some Americans who are the best or among the best in the lower divisions (Mayweather, Tim Bradley, a younger Moseley), but even here they are under-represented relative to other sports. I think this is because a) boxing is a way out of poverty, so attracts a disproportionate number of third world athletes, particularly from Mexico and some African countries; and b) the average American or Euro man is too large to compete in the lower weight divisions. The pool of American/Euro men who could compete in the lower divisions is not that large.
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