Yeah sure, I totally get the point being made but historically there are very few American fighters below bantam, just because of genetics.SaadOffTheDeck wrote:It's due to geography more than anything else. They make good money fighting in Japan and Thailand that they couldn't get here. The logistics of traveling with your crew and the time zone differences just don't make fiscal sense to televise fighters that the majority of your viewers have never heard of.orbtastic wrote:Is that largely down to the lack of [in general terms] American opponents that make televising fights worthwhile or even possible?dempseyfire wrote:The big difference btw the Latin little men and Asian little men is the big fights featuring the latter are practically never shown on American television.
Americans seldom care about lower weight fighters, my Uncle was talking to me on Christmas about Boxing in the 40's and he didn't know any of the Flyweights I brought up. When I grew up in the 80's they drew the line at Bantamweight as far as televised bouts.
You have Viloria and Carbajal, for example, but they are both of non American extraction. I mean I can name guys who fought at lower weights - Jeff Chandler, for example, but they are fairly rare. If there were more "American" fighters at the really low weights, then there would be comp (and money/purses) worth travelling for.
Carbajal only fought one other american fighter of any note his whole career (without checking on boxrec) he was just fortunate that he had the Olympics win and guys like Gonzalez to build a rivalry with (I believe their first fight was the first million dollar fight at that low a poundage and the first PPV etc). I don't know the ins and outs of purses but I'd imagine Top Rank (think it was them?) had to dangle a reasonable carrot to get the Thai guy over for his first title shot. You have to have some sort of TV pull in order to do that, it's quite an usual situation, certainly for that poundage.
I always felt sorry for Ricardo Lopez, he was clearly a very talented fighter but suffered from weighing just over 100lbs and not really having any sort of pool of names to fight. You saw him time and time again tucked away down on DK undercards fighting for $50,000 while less talented fighters beat up cans and no marks for ten times as much. Only at the very end of his career did he manage to even top a card, then shortly after his career biggest win he was back to being tucked away on undercards again.
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with anything being said, just trying to further expand my point about lack of American fighters below say, bantam. The same is generally true in Europe, it's just genetics.
