AS SHOCKING as it was to see Nottingham’s Leigh Wood change a likely defeat into certain victory against Josh Warrington on Saturday (October 7), it was not a patch on the shock of seeing DAZN inform its audience that “four icons of the game” – “game” presumably meaning boxing – would fill the same slot on their channel the following weekend.
These four icons were of course not Ray Leonard, Thomas Hearns, Marvin Hagler and Roberto Duran, but instead something else. Something other. Something alien. Something confusing, unsettling, and rather depressing. Their game, unlike the game of the Four Kings, is not boxing at all, or at least not the boxing we all recognise and tell ourselves is still boxing; that is, a sport still thriving, relevant, and important. It is not, for example, the same boxing we saw on Saturday night, when Leigh Wood and Josh Warrington appeared on DAZN and delivered for their audience one of the most compelling fights
