This year has kicked off as spectacularly as any that I can remember in professional boxing. We've spoken lately about Al Haymon's mega deals in the US with NBC and Spike TV, but in recent days it was also announced that professional boxing will be shown for the first time in many a year on terrestrial (network) television in the UK on one of their gigantic broadcasters - ITV. I'm a fairly level headed guy and I don't get carried away with things too much anymore (like I did in my younger days) but I have to admit, things are really looking positive this year for our sport, if I may speculate.


Floyd Mayweather likes to say "Men lie, women lie, numbers don't lie". Say what you will about the man, but I believe there to be a lot of truth in that statement. That statement's end "numbers" is something that the TV companies' look at before making a decision to back a sport. Granted, Haymon has shelved out of his own pocket in America to invest in the game but still, the fact their broadcasting boxing must show that they believe in the upward trend that so many of us are seeing at the moment.

The details of the UK deal with ITV and World champion Carl Frampton's promoter Barry McGuigan are not as clear in terms of numbers, with the deal likely to be fight to fight, but nonetheless it was expressed by both parties (TV company and boxing promoter) that there is very much mutual benefit with the arrangement and should the fight do well, the likely hood is there will be plenty of more boxing shown in the future. In short, boxing is BACK.

It always startled me that such a well supported, exciting sport such as pro boxing had dwindled in the eyes of television companies in the past decade during the global recession, when arguably people needed entertainment more than ever.

Boxing has been around for hundreds of years, and when you really ponder it, fighting by nature was probably one of the first activities that man ever engaged in (along the other obvious ones!).

As the president of the UFC Dana White once put it "Fighting is in our DNA, we get and we like it." He's right. As far as we've come and as much as humanity has progressed, there will always be that organic, primal nature in our makeup, that perhaps is responsible for many of our flaws and limitations as a species. That's exactly where boxing fits in for a lot the audience that consumes it as a product.

A lot of fight fans just want to see wars, knockouts. Don't get me wrong, so do I. But us hardcore, passionate, purist brethren who enjoy the more precise intricacies of the game pertaining to things like footwork, punch variation, head movement and so on, are outnumbered heavily by the former audience. And that's okay too - we all love the sport.

And now in 2015, the casual fan is once again getting brought right back into the thick of things within the sweet science, through the increased exposure and publicity the noble art at a professional level is now enjoying and flourishing in once again. The next generation will inevitably be hooked, absorbed and converted into fight fans by this magnetic and compelling sport of ours, and on and on it goes, this thing of ours! It's up to the promoters and all involved to put on the BEST fights possible for the fans in the coming years.

If rumors are true and Mayweather Pacquiao is announced in the coming days, the icing will be on the cake for the return of boxing to its glory days starting this year in 2015, in the new digital era we now find ourselves living in. Welcome to the new age fight fans.