ADVENTURER

IN the spring of 2015, the American broadcast network NBC aired a commercial for a new boxing series aimed at revolutionising the sport. The 30-second spot featured a coterie of young boxers sporting natty black suits and their glitziest timepieces, as they strutted – in languid slow motion – out of a dark corridor and into a sea of exploding flashbulbs on a red carpet, all set to the booming tune of Jadakiss’ proverbial communiqué The Champ is Here. Of the boxers, the most noteworthy were Adrien Broner, Keith Thurman, and Danny Garca, ascendant welterweights who at the time represented, from the standpoint of both ability and personality, the vanguard of the post-Floyd Mayweather generation, a point underscored in the commercial when the narrator intoned that “there was a time when the most famous person in America was the boxing champion of the world.” A few beats later, the segment cut to Sugar Ray Leonard stepping out of a limo, flaunting his familiar champagne smile.

The message of this appealing, if tad overheated, advertisement drew on a powerful premise: boxing, once regarded as a beloved mainstream sport, had suffered a winnowing effect of sorts over the past few decades, primarily because, so the story went, it had aligned itself with the subscriber-based model of pay cable television, thus drastically diminishing its visibility. Now,