A ramble originally titled "Why Boxing And Its Journalism Suck, Symptom #395762"

You don't have to take in a lot of articles and interviews related to an upcoming boxing card [the bulk of material published in the field] to realize that they're largely pro-bono promotion dressed like he-said-and-then-he-said journalism, with even veteran journalists and historians more or less falling in line with the "conventional wisdom" of how a fight will play out being whatever the fight's promoters say the wisdom will be in their press releases. It's after the fight is done and in the record books that reality-based conventional wisdom begins to dominate the chatter and most folks observe a gentleman's agreement to cram everything about the pre-fight bullshit down the nearest Memory Hole.

I always enjoy Bert Sugar as a "character." He's a staple in most media promotions in the sport, especially for pay-per-view megafights, and can always be counted on for some snappy patter about why "Fighter X Vs. Fighter Y" is worth your time and/or $54.99. That said, it's painfully clear that he's just as much of a pack-follower as the rest of the boxing-journalism herd. Even as fishy as the editing is of the two Sugar interviews in the clip above, they illustrate the Before/After dynamic pretty well: "This is gonna be a great fight, we may even see an upset despite the overwhelming odds!" and then "Anyone coulda seen what a mismatch that fight was from the get-go! Phew!"

Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Juan Manuel Marquez was a mismatch from the get-go. Even with Mayweather's brief retirement from the sport as a significant X-factor, no boxer in the lower weight classes can jump as many weight divisions as Marquez did from one fight to the next and have a shot at winning on a championship level, unless the bigger man is a shot fighter [read: Manny Pacquiao vs. Oscar De La Hoya]. It's just not done. One would have to be dense, ignorant and/or dishonest to claim that Sugar and his ilk are making the argument that literally no one who has fought as a lightweight has ever had a big win at welter, so it's funny that the above videomaker chose Roberto Duran and Sugar Shane Mosley as examples. Both men were already established in/around the welterweight division and actually came DOWN in weight for the WW wins cited -- Duran fought Wellington Wheatley [what a great name] at 148 prior to his first fight with Sugar Ray Leonard, and Mosley did the same thing, fighting another unheralded "W.W." [Willy Wise, another great name] at 148 before his first match with De La Hoya at welterweight. That's not to take anything away from Duran's and Mosley's extraordinary victories, just pointing out that neither man was attempting what Marquez [and presumably every other man foolish enough to try it too] failed to achieve.

Looking back at my Marquez-Mayweather pre-fight post, I see I never went back and unpacked why pound-for-pound lists are meaningless, fantasy-football horseshit. For those of you unfamiliar with P4P, they're unofficial rankings of the best fighters in the sport, regardless of what weight division they compete in. Like most fantasy-sports leagues, the criterion for these P4P rankings differ from one rank-maker to the next, but a common one is the idea of how one boxer [say, heavyweight Vitali Klitschko] would do against another boxer [a lightweight like Marquez is literally half Klitschko's size] if they were the same weight. Such patently ridiculous games of "What If?" are generally pretty obvious to non-boxing sports fans -- are these rankings supposed to compensate the bigger man for a corresponding loss of power as he shrinks? Does the smaller man retain his body's natural gifts as he's blown up in size? If P4P is supposed to equalize the fighters' physical advantages to compare skill levels, how is that not an asinine waste of time? Someone like Sonny Liston probably didn't know a check hook from a checkbook, but he didn't need to know because of the one-punch-and-the-fight-is-over power he had in both hands; of what constructive use are these P4P rankings if that means that a Liston would lose to a slick minimumweight with no pop like Ivan Calderon?

This would be a benign waste of time if it were solely a parlor game for boxing fans, the pugilist version of comic nerds' "Who's stronger/Who would win in a fight, Thor or Hulk?", but nearly every boxing publication has its own pound-for-pound list, diligently updated, presented and debated on a weekly or monthly basis. Now, I'm not enough of a boxing-journalism historian to know for sure, but I would bet half the farm on the rise of the P4P rankings being a quite recent mania. I'm not enough of a mob-mentality psychologist to know for sure, but I would hypothesize that this semi-institutional flight into fantasy is the result of the boxing fan rarely getting competitive fights, much less regular doses of the best fighters fighting the best.

It's interesting to note that you can check out ESPN's Dan Rafael's Top 10 rankings for each of the 16 modern weight classes for free, but you have to pay to see his Top 20 P4P list. It's also interesting that Rafael is one of the rare rank-makers who also maintains more than a P4P list [although this may simply be just a habit/momentum carried over from his time as USA TODAY's boxing writer, in the waning days of the sport's mass-media presence] -- you would think it would be the other way around, that journalists would inform their audience on who the 10 best fighters are in a division, with the implication that those men should be fighting each other instead of the parade of "soup cans" they pummel instead. But no, those writers don't do that -- instead they convene a panel of experts to decide the best current fighters would be if they could face off in matches held in the Peter Pan Memorial Pavilion in Cloud Cuckoo Land.

It is far more comforting to speculate on who would win in an imaginary fight between, say, Mayweather and featherweight Chris John than it is to stare at the Welterweight rankings and realize that all the fights that could be made there have already been made. Mayweather's never going to be so hard up for money that he'll have to fight Pacquiao. Mayweather and Andre Berto share the same manager, so that fight's also out unless all three men run out of money and/or better options. Berto/Pacquiao could happen but probably won't, as Berto couldn't even draw a thousand paying fans to a Haitian-earthquake benefit fight held in his hometown; even propped up with million-dollar HBO paydays and a championship belt, Berto's run as a "top" fighter won't last much longer. Pacquiao/Mosley is possible, if the legal battle between their promoters can be sidestepped, but who wants to watch Manny demolish another one of Floyd's sloppy seconds? [See also: De La Hoya, Ricky Hatton.] And no one wants to see Joshua Clottey fight anyone after his virtuoso stinking-out of Cowboys Stadium last April. The Bottom 5 of most rankings present a precipitous drop-off in names that are recognizable to sports-television executives, so those fighters won't even reach American airwaves, much less fights with the top fighters. I assume these European, Asian and South American greats also pollute their respective countrymen's televisions with mismatches against their local suppendosen/スープ缶/latas de sopa.

In the rare instances where the best boxers in a division actually commit to fighting the best, as in Showtime's "Super Six Super-Middleweight Boxing Classic," the fans don't know how to react so most revert to their default setting of "Assholic," complaining that the tournament is taking too long and there have been too many injuries. The "Are we there yet?" whining conveniently elides the simple reality that boxers on the HBO/Showtime-level fight twice, sometimes three times a year at the most, so the S6 was going to take a year and a half to two years to complete no matter what happened. Going by the loose schedule attached to Showtime's initial announcement of the Classic, the Carl Froch-Arthur Abraham fight was actually going to be held a month earlier than originally planned before Froch's injury pushed the fight back to later this month. It's strange that many fight fans and even some journalists would prefer a single-elimination, hurry-up-and-get-it-over-with quickie to the promise of 18 months to two years' worth of regular elite-level fights between nearly every combination of the best boxers in a division. I imagine few of them actually pay for premium cable TV.

As for the injuries, I guess when even an elite boxer fights one elite fighter after another instead of an elite fighter then an unranked part-time club fighter then a badly faded old champion looking for one last payday before retiring, it can wreck a guy. Like I've said, it happens so rarely that it's understandable that fans would be confused and angered by the injuries at first -- also, fighters get injured and fights get pushed back all the time [last Saturday's Green-Johnson match was the undercard to featherweights Juan Manuel Lopez vs. Rafael Marquez, a fight that was rescheduled after Marquez injured his thumb; where's the outrage?], only none of them were under one tourney/promotional umbrella. I think it's great, and not too surprising, that the Super Six [Jermaine Taylor, Abraham, Froch, Andre Dirrell, Andre Ward and Mikkel Kessler] has become the Super Ten [Allan Green and Glen Johnson replacing Taylor and Kessler, with Ward taking a non-S6 fight with Dirrell's replacement Sakio Bika, and now division kingpin Lucian Bute standing in the wings to fight the S6 winner late next year], drawing all of the best super-middleweights into the mix until there is no doubt who is the best 168-pound boxer in our post-Calzaghe world. It makes sense that if a network gets commitments from a half-dozen of the biggest names and best fighters in a division, then the rest of the elite will have no choice but to either throw themselves into that talent vortex or sit on the sidelines with no big-money fights for what's an eternity in prime boxer's years.

There's a killer mix of young lions and cagey veterans available for a featherweight Super Six -- John, Lopez, Yuriorkis Gamboa, Elio Rojas, Celestino Caballero and Daniel Ponce De Leon, with Rafael Marquez a good Jermain Taylor-type to fill in if one of the others can't or won't sign on -- but it's unlikely to happen. This is a shame that no pound-for-pound list can cure.