This Saturday night is the “Strikeforce: Heavy Artillery” show from St. Louis, Missouri, headlined by that other heavyweight champion Alistair Overeem taking on Fedor’s most recent opponent and rising MMA star, Brett Rogers.

Big muscles, anemic reputation - Strikeforce Heavyweight Champion Alistair Overeem (Photo: K-1)

The burning question isn’t whether Overeem’s skills may have faded over the last two and a half years whilst he battled far lesser competition overseas, or if Brett Rogers can use a superior ground game to overcome Overeem’s more technically sound striking. It’s whether or not Overeem is going to fight clean of Performance Enhancing Drugs, and if the Missouri State Athletic Commission is going to test him at all.

Jonathan Snowden over at Bloody Elbow wrote about Missouri’s secretive testing procedures, which seem to indicate it’s likely Overeem won’t be tested at all and, if he is, it won’t be as thorough and accurate a test as one might encounter in one of the more reputable States with an Athletic Commission (eg. Nevada, New Jersey).

Some have taken the media and bloggers to task for crucifying Overeem for what is, to date, unconfirmed speculation of drug use. Overeem himself says that it’s not unheard of for someone to gain ten pounds of muscle mass a year, and he’s also in the past attributed his dramatic increase in size to a diet heavy on horse meat.

Regardless, it creates even more questions of legitimacy in a fledging promotion that has been plagued with them over the course of the last few months.

Overeem, whether he’s using performance enhancing drugs or not, has not faced a real test at heavyweight in his career. All name fighters he’s beaten, a la Mirko Cro Cop, have been long past their prime. He has taken fights for the sake of appearing on the card despite several opportunities to fight in the States. It certainly raises a lot of questions. Not just about whether or not he’s clean, but whether or not he’s confident enough in his own abilities to face a real challenge at heavyweight.

It almost seems as if Strikeforce would have been better off without Fedor Emelianenko. Now they have a costly WAMMA Heavyweight Champion (a title granted by an organization that is for all intents and purposes defunct) whose management brings them back into the room after every fight and a promotional champion who will never be seen as legitimate in the eyes of fans. Even a convincing victory over Brett Rogers and subsequent win over Fedor Emelianenko will not alleviate the speculation about his size increase.

Some will argue that focusing on the lighter weight classes would cause Strikeforce to flounder and lose money without a heavyweight drawing card. Unfortunately, that discounts the fact that Emelianenko has become a bottomless pit of money for which they’ve seen absolutely no financial return and that, unlike Japan, fans in North America won’t pay money to see a fight if they don’t consider one or both of the fighters to be legitimate.

As I’ve written before, Strikeforce’s biggest obstacle to success is the view fans have of it as a disaster waiting to happen. Right now they’re trying to run uphill with a Russian heavyweight managed by crazy goons, a disgraced promotional champion who won’t fight stateside, and a post-fight mugging on network television amongst other mis-steps. As unfair as Dana White’s comments are at times, he’s not pulling these observations out of thin air.

It’s too late to steer the ship in the other direction, since they’ve already set the stage for an Overeem/Fedor fight or rematch with Rogers. But once they’ve hit that landfall, they’d be better off as a promotion if they followed part of the formula for success that brought the UFC to dominance in the sport – focus on the fighting and make the fighters the stars of your promotion, and not the other way around.

That said, the sporting of boxing has to change its approach.

MMA as a whole sells entire fight cards and brand names. This is not to downplay the importance of an intriguing name event or star power, as every promotion needs it in order to thrive and succeed. However, a disappointing or less than intriguing main event can still succeed and give fans their money’s worth based on the strength of the card and overall presentation. This is how the UFC not only became successful, but also made its name its biggest asset: the main draws aren’t just their champions, it’s the UFC itself.

Pacquiao's domination of Clottey had fans twiddling their thumbs and analysts grumbling (photo: Chris Cozzone, The Times Online)

Boxing is a completely different animal, and not just for its style and presentation.  Since its inception, the business model for boxing has been to sell fights and/or individual fighters. This is not necessarily a bad thing, obviously, since the sport has survived and thrived for many years using this method. The problem is that it gives the appearance that the promotional system in place for boxing is archaic and out of touch. As cliché as it sounds, we live in a rapidly changing world. Technology, the world economy, business, travel, and communication have evolved, warped, and changed at a nearly incalculable and unprecedented rate. Attitudes and expectations have swung in wildly different directions in some industries. Combat sports, and boxing specifically, may be no different.

Unfortunately, boxing hasn’t changed much in terms of its approach in the last decade. They have stuck to a formula of personalities over principles. Promoters still negotiate the most politically viable fights possible, even and particularly when it comes to championship bouts. For even the most loyal boxing enthusiast, championships and rankings are suspect and questionable in an industry where the two best fighters in the world can’t come together because of political power plays, grudges between a boxer and promoter, and a litany of reasons having nothing to do with actual sport and competition.

Granted, these problems exist in MMA and other sports as well, but the fact that there are really only two major draws left in boxing – Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao – should signal to many that it’s time for a major change. Even moreso that neither of them are anywhere close to heavyweight, which is still the biggest potential money maker in combat sports despite the fact that it doesn’t even exist in the eyes of the mainstream in North America. I’d like to say that mainstream fans have simply come to appreciate the more technically sound and faster-paced lighter weight classes, but the unfortunate truth is that an industry that thrives on marketing personalities cannot sell North American audiences on bouts between Eastern European and Russian boxers.

Then again, maybe they could if boxing changed its approach. Pacquiao and Mayweather are still drawing mainstream attention and money, but perhaps nowhere near what they could bring in. More importantly, it doesn’t seem to help the industry as a whole. It may be time for them to shift to a model where interest is built around an entire evening of bouts with an intriguing main event, rather than a single fight built around a superstar facing a fighter for whom millions of dollars is spent in vain to convince a skeptical audience is a worthy contender.

The pay-per-view will do good numbers based on the presence of Manny Pacquiao and the fact that the fight took place in the spectacle of Cowboys stadium. Unfortunately, you can’t pull the same ballyhoo trick of a stadium locale twice. Fans are going to be more skeptical than ever, particularly after what they saw on Saturday night. The announcers (who themselves may see a need to change to a more big-card rather than big-fight approach) completely buried the undercard throughout the broadcast and openly admitted to the audience that the fights and fighters they were watching belonged nowhere near a card costing in excess of fifty dollars. As for the fight itself, to call it a one-sided affair would be an understatement. Pacquiao threw 1,231 punches over the course of twelve rounds to Clottey’s 399. That’s not a typo.

As far as how to execute a new game plan, I won’t pretend to have all the answers. I concede as well that making these changes is easier said than done. Boxing doesn’t have the benefit of having come up in the last two decades under essentially one banner, and as such you have a lot of powerful and influential promoters and players involved. Beyond the logistics of getting everyone to come together for the benefit of the sport and against their own individual financial interests, it’s tougher to stack a full boxing card as opposed to MMA since boxing fights tend (and are scheduled) to last longer.

All I’m saying is that something has to be done. Despite what some analysts would lead you to believe, boxing and MMA are not engaged in a direct competition. It’s not a zero sum game where people won’t watch boxing because they watch the UFC. I myself am primarily a fan of MMA, but I’ll certainly watch boxing when it’s made available (and intriguing) to me. However, there are two big obstacles to me developing a greater and more consistent appreciation of boxing. One is the cost of pay-per-views, which in addition to all of the MMA shows would break me. The other is lack of interest amongst both personal friends in the area and local establishments that would potentially show these fights.

Different promotional strategies, like the Super Six World Boxing Classic, are key to attracting and maintaining a new audience.

In fairness, there are people in the boxing game that recognize this as a problem and are offering attempts at a solution. Showtime and Sauerland Event promotion organized the “Super Six World Boxing Classic,” a tournament containing six top-ranked Super Middleweights to decide a consensus Unified Super Middleweight Champion (consisting of the WBC and WBA titles).  The tournament started in late 2009 and is ongoing. Though criticized by some, it’s a unique and fascinating approach. It has created interest not only in a whole boxing division that had been ignored, but also makes names out of six fighters who otherwise might be unknown to the layman fight fan.

Hopefully it’s the beginning of a new trend of promoters and promotions trying new techniques beyond throwing someone up against a mega-star and praying that enough people buy him as a viable challenger. Boxing isn’t dead or on life support, but to pretend it hasn’t lost much of its luster stateside is foolish and self-defeating. There is a way to renew interest in the sport and pull in fans such as myself. They just have to concede to change and not write me off as an unreachable audience.