Boxing hitting the big time again

THEY may have spent the last three months winding each other up, pouring scorn on their rival’s talents and rubbishing each other’s prospects for success in tonight’s WBC welterweight title fight but if there is one thing that both the Mayweather and Hatton camps agree on, it is that boxing is once again back in the big time.

After years in the doldrums amid fight-fixing scandals, in-fighting between promoters, an unwarranted number of title-sanctioning bodies and declining television exposure allied to the rise of mixed martial arts formats such as the Ultimate Fighting Championships, the sweet science has regained its composure, picked itself up off the canvas and come out fighting for another round.

Tonight’s showdown at Las Vegas’s MGM Garden Arena between Floyd Mayweather Jnr and Ricky Hatton brings to an end a year of success for the sport not experienced since the 1980s and 90s when virtually every weight division could conjure up a superfight to whet the appetite and then deliver the goods for massive tv audiences. Month after month in that golden era brought genuine superstars onto our screens, from Ireland’s featherweight livewire Barry McGuigan to the great middleweight quartet of Sugar Ray Leonard, Marvin Hagler, Thomas Hearns and Roberto Duran, and from the epic super-middleweight battles between Chris Eubank, Nigel Benn and Steve Collins to the heavyweight prowess of Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield.