Roy Jones Jr. will return to the ring on March 21 to take on the little-known Omar Sheika in a card that he's promoting himself, with mixed martial arts fights featuring Seth Petruzelli and Bobby Lashley on the undercard.Combining boxing and MMA has been tried before, although never in a card featuring a fighter as well known as Jones. And although neither Petruzelli nor Lashley is anywhere close to being a great MMA fighter, they're both well known: Petruzelli beat Kimbo Slice on national television in October, while Lashley was once among the most popular pro wrestlers in the WWE. Another MMA fight on the card is supposed to match Roy Nelson against Jeff Monson, although Monson's legal problems could make that difficult.
The card will take place at the Pensacola Civic Center and be shown on pay-per-view, but will anyone buy it? I have a hard time seeing this selling very well. Jones was once the best boxer in the world, but that was a long time ago. He's 40 years old now, and he got destroyed in his last fight, a unanimous decision loss to Joe Calzaghe. How many people want to spend $50 to watch an over-the-hill Jones against an opponent only the most hard-core of boxing fans have ever heard of?
I also have my doubts about the pay-per-view worthiness of the MMA offerings. Nelson vs. Monson and Petruzelli vs. Doug Marshall are OK fights, but not the kinds of fights that fans will plunk down their hard-earned money to purchase. Lashley is probably the biggest draw of the MMA bunch, but his opponent hasn't been named yet.
And then there's the question of whether boxing fans want to watch MMA and MMA fans want to watch boxing. In general, there isn't a lot of crossover between the two. I personally love both boxing and MMA and would love to see cards like this succeed, but I have my doubts.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
2-07-2009 @ 12:05PM
da1prophet said...
RJ is one of my all time favorites, but he's always had something of a delusional view of his own marketability. I don't know if you remember his late night infomercials where he was selling a highlight DVD of his career--not just a single highlight DVD but a setup like "Girls Gone Wild" where they send you a new RJ highlight DVD *every month* until you cancel! There are few who can match my "fight geekery" but I can't think of anyone in boxing history who warrants more than a couple of DVD's for their career highlights. Maybe you could go to three for Ali, Louis, Archie Moore and a few others...just the idea that RJ thought that fans would whip out their credit cards for monthly highlight DVDs crack me up. Making them even better was that they were narrated by a bad Howard Cosell impersonator (since the real Cosell was inconveniently dead) and RJ's power shots were embellished with sound effects...
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2-07-2009 @ 12:11PM
da1prophet said...
Also, at least among boxing geeks I wouldn't call Omar Sheika "little known"--he was a perennial super middleweight contender in the early part of the decade. He's a good enough fighter but one of those guys who could never break into the top tier, losing any time he stepped up in class (most notably to Joe Calzaghe and Jeff 'Left Hook' Lacy).
Of course he could walk through one of the half dozen "Hooters'" restaurants in Pensacola completely unnoticed--so your point is still well taken that he ain't going to sell any PPVs to casual boxing/MMA fans. I might try to catch the event live just because of its "train wreck" potential and to see Bobby Lashley fight ;-)
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2-07-2009 @ 5:15PM
Michael David Smith said...
Thanks for your comments, and yeah, I meant "little known" in the sense that he won't draw a pay-per-view audience, not that boxing fans have never heard of him.