The New Yorker:

Eager to make the sport feel relevant again, promoters staged a series of fights in one of the most crowded places in America.

By Kelefa Sanneh

On Friday evening, I was texting with a friend when I happened to mention where I was: sitting in the middle of Times Square, watching a boxing match. He wrote back immediately: “What is the boxing match about? Like what is its significance?” This was a good question, although not one that could be answered in the minute-long break between rounds, and possibly not one that could be answered at all.

In a sense, the perversity of the idea was the point: find the busiest, most crowded place in America and then shut down enough of it to erect a boxing ring, as a way of proclaiming to the world that the sport still matters. Eddie Hearn, a second-generation boxing promoter, from England, was one of the people behind the event. A day before, standing in the ring as construction workers bustled around him, Hearn told me that, initially, he had been skeptical of the enterprise. “Up to about two or three weeks ago, I was still thinking, Surely, like, at some point, it’s just not gonna happen,” he said. Many fans didn’t quite believe it until the week of the fight, when the ring materialized on a patch of sidewalk north of Forty-third Street and east of Seventh Avenue, a few feet from the military-recruiting station. “Now I’m standing here thinking, The numbers are gonna be really big tomorrow—like, the global exposure of what is happening is getting bigger,” Hearn said. The former champion Oscar De La Hoya was also promoting the event, although he had conceded on Thursday that he wasn’t quite sure how it would work. “About the walk-out, I have no clue,” he said—there were no nearby locker rooms from which the fighters could dramatically emerge. “They might come out of the Starbucks Coffee, here.”

Go to link