Arran McLachlan and Rolly Romero continue their conversation on promoting today’s fighters.
Arran McLachlan: It feels like society keeps asking more from the fighters too. In Floyd’s era, you were selling pay-per-views and that’s where the money came from. Without that incentive, people are just trying to raise their social media metrics, trying to be as big a celebrity as possible, and the two things are clashing.
Rolly: The thing is, I feel like what really stirred boxing was mainstream TV hopping out of it. There have been so many factors. Boxing is in a very weird position. And to have it truly reborn? I’m a fighter, but it’s not going to affect my generation. My generation is already in the mega fights. We’re all champions. We’ve all done this and that. It’s going to affect the generation below us, and those guys are going to get hit severely, financially. It’s sad. They’re not going to see anywhere near the kind of money we’ve seen.
Arran McLachlan: Especially with the power plays you see being made right now. Certain promotional outfits trying to consolidate everything. It’s going to be an interesting time for the next gen.
Rolly: But tell me, name any fighter from that next generation that truly knows how to promote themselves.
Arran McLachlan: That’s a difficult one for them, you know when we look at guys like Oscar in the 90s, and Floyd especially, when he broke away from top rank, it went from “I’m not going to rely on a promoter to promote me, I can promote myself” and turned into this era of endless self-promotion, and raising your star becoming the main thing.
Rolly: The only way you could become a celebrity back then was if you were on TV. And at the time all the TV networks were tied to boxing: that’s how you became a celebrity. Now there are so many different avenues. You can even fake being a celebrity by buying followers and all that stuff. Like me, I got what? Like 380k followers on instagram? Yeah, and I walked by some dude that has three million and who’s the more famous one? I’ve never seen any of these guys ever get stopped to take a picture. You see me. I can’t walk down the street without taking a picture.
Arran McLachlan: Yeah, it’s like there’s a major disconnect between actual celebrity and social media.
Rolly: Social media does not mean you’re a celebrity; yeah, you’re a little influencer that got a little bit of clout that did some stupid stuff and went viral and a bunch of seven-year-olds and twelve-year-olds started following you, but those people don’t buy tickets. That’s why like, all this stuff like the streaming, you know the whole like twitch and kick and all this stuff, right, like that doesn’t generate money for the sport. I mean they’re streaming on kick or twitch or something, right? You think they’re not going to go stream a pay-per-view? The people that buy boxing are not the people that are on those streaming sites.
You know it’s the other people that don’t even know what boxing is. Those are people that buy boxing. The casual boxing fan does not buy a boxing ticket, I’m sorry to say.
Interview sponsored by Betinia NJ
