Boxing Has Never Been Less Relevant

The sweet science only lives on in fiction.

If you were to experience sports entirely through your popular entertainment, you would think the sport of boxing is thriving right now. Over the last year, we have seen:

A series about Mike Tyson starring Trevante Rhodes from Moonlight:

A movie about George Foreman:

Another Mark Wahlberg movie about a boxer:

And, of course, the upcoming Creed III, out this weekend, in which Michael B. Jordan, one of the biggest movie stars in the world (and making his directorial debut), stars in the first Rocky movie that doens’t have Rocky in it.

This is a lot, a lot of boxing drama. Which is interesting because the actual sport of boxing is almost entirely irrelevant on the global sporting stage. The decline of boxing has been an ongoing sports plotline for decades now, for a variety of reasons, from CTE to a lack of a central ruling agency to the rampant corruption and greed that has always been inextricable from the sport itself. But I’m not sure the sport itself has ever been more invisible.

Here’s a question for you: Who’s the IBF heavyweight champion of the world right now?