Making a case for The Contender
Sports haven’t been truly appreciated recently on television. Live games are slowly but surely all migrating to cable, with both Monday Night Football and the Bowl Championship Series, undoubtedly marquee sports properties, calling ESPN their new home in recent years. In fact, even Stanley Cup games are now being placed on cable in the United States.
Outside of live events, the picture is even worse. Prime time programming has never been friendly to the world of sports. Inside Schwartz and Clubhouse never fully received a chance to prove themselves. Sports Night and Friday Night Lights, two of the best shows of their times, only received extended shots due to massive critical acclaim and still never truly found an audience, though Friday Night Lights still has a chance to find the fans they deserve.
The one sport that has been visibly hurt the most by the changing dynamics of sports television is boxing. Formerly a cornerstone of network sports coverage, boxing’s promoters are now having trouble buying airtime from the big four US broadcasters, an idea which would have been laughable 20 years ago. The sport is now relegated mainly to premium cable networks such as HBO and Showtime, in addition to difficult timeslots on smaller cable outlets, such as Versus and ESPN2.
Four years ago, however, reality television kingpin Mark Burnett elected to roll the dice on the sport. Fresh off of major success stories in Survivor and The Apprentice, Burnett sold NBC on taking a shot at the sport in prime time. The result was The Contender, a 16-man middleweight tournament determined to find the next “Rocky”. This point was hammered home by the show’s host, Sylvester Stallone. Casual and avid fans alike tuned into the show, immediately observing 16 fighters, very few of whom were even considered minor names in the sport, being given the superstar treatment. However, even though the talent was slightly lacking, with many of the matches being classified as sloppy, the show was a treat.
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In an attempt to make the show reality television’s answer to Rocky, the show threw boxing legend Sugar Ray Leonard, in addition to famed trainers Tommy Gallagher and Jackie Kallen, into the mix. Combined with the show’s fantastic score and cinematography, every fight seemed like a big fight. It was truly what the sport needed. Though many hardcore fans complained about the fights being packaged, with big punches being placed in slow-motion, as opposed to shown in their entirety, the show served the purpose of getting casual fans into the sport. It undoubtedly also provided them some favourite fighters to pique their interest in boxing, even after the show went off the air.
Unfortunately, just like Friday Night Lights and Sports Night, the show couldn’t find enough viewers. While the program certainly did have its flaws, it attempted to create a new niche in prime time sports programming, and nearly succeeded. In fact, to this day, the show’s Ishe Smith-Ahmed Kaddour fight still remains my most-anticipated fight as a boxing fan. In a sport that is currently ridiculously outmarketed by the relatively new Ultimate Fighting Championship, the fact that a boxing match between two guys who could never amount to being more than journeymen, a term which might even be too optimistic in one case, is a major accomplishment.
Though the show might not have had enough widespread appeal for NBC’s audience, The Contender still lives on. Gone are Stallone and the washed-up celebrities that he brought to ringside for the first season, as Leonard overtook the host’s role for the second and third seasons, which aired on ESPN. The rosters, however, got better. Fighters saw that mediocre fighters like Ishe Smith and Peter Manfredo Jr. picked up bigger fights simply due to name recognition from their roles on the NBC show.
The first season’s most popular fighter, Alfonso Gomez, used his cachet to get an HBO fight with superstar Arturo Gatti, which Gomez won in a shocking upset, sending Gatti into retirement. That led to another HBO fight for Gomez, a loss to a prime Miguel Cotto. The ultimate winner of the first season, Sergio Mora, eventually cashed in on his fame by winning the WBC Junior Middleweight Championship over big-name veteran Vernon Forrest, proving that the show was certainly a vehicle to success. Second season finalist Steve Forbes was probably the biggest beneficiary of the show, as his participation in The Contender got him what every fighter dreams of: A lucrative payday against the sport’s biggest draw, Oscar De La Hoya.
Every once in a while, the show also managed to churn out a great fight. The third season finale, which aired live on ESPN, was headlined by the season’s championship bout between veteran Sakio Bika and rising young prospect Jaidon Codrington. After a rousing first frame in which both fighters hit the mat, Bika ultimately walked away with a TKO in the eighth round. The battle was roundly considered a 2007 Fight of the Year candidate.
After two years on ESPN, the show’s fourth season, now highlighting the sport’s cruiserweight division, is airing on Versus. Sugar Ray Leonard is now out of the picture, with former pro boxer and Who’s the Boss? star Tony Danza bringing all 19 rounds of his pro boxing experience into the show’s hosting position. The show’s now based out of Singapore, with the story revolving primarily around the fights themselves, as opposed to the NBC version’s reliance on the individual fighters’ backstories and families to be the centerpiece.
It’s undoubtedly a different type of show, with the scale not quite as grand as it once was, but when the fighters get into the ring, it’s still all about two men fighting for a better life. The same orchestral music and slow-mo punches are still there, and I still get excited for relatively meaningless fights. It’s a shame that NBC never truly gave The Contender another shot at the big time.
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