Difficult Lives: On Cradle of Champions

[thenonpareil]

Sean Nam on Cradle of Champions, a documentary focusing on the dreams and lives of New York Golden Gloves participants.

In Cradle of Champions, a new documentary, by first-time director Bartle Bull, that follows the lives of three New York City Golden Gloves hopefuls in 2015, the famed tournament appears in its eighty-eighth iteration. That it still exists today nearly a century after Gallico’s initial proposal is a testimony to its resilience; only the Olympics exceeds it in terms of longevity. And yet one does not have to look too hard to find that the Golden Gloves, like the sport itself, is a far cry from what it used to be. The finals, for one, no longer take place at the self-styled “World’s Most Famous Arena,” but across the East River, in Brooklyn at the Barclays Center. The crowds, which once turned up in droves for the finals from Gallico’s days to the mid-80s, are now unspeakably small, no more than the size of a large wedding or a bar mitzvah. (In fact, the tournament has almost no constituency outside of relatives and friends of the participating boxers.) Like every other legacy media outlet today, the Daily News, which continues to sponsor the tournament, struggles to stay afloat in the Digital Age and has seen its daily circulation drop to 200,000 from the more than two million it boasted in its heyday. And, of course, there is the unassailable fact that boxing, simply, is no longer a sport that most Americans much care for.

Full article here:

https://hannibalboxing.com/difficult-li ... champions/

[oogiebe]

Good stuff, but should be in Amateur forum.