Boxing or Performance?

As a youth growing up in Britain, I was captivated by the drama of televised wrestling. Characters like Big Daddy, Giant Haystacks, and Kendo Nagasaki brought larger-than-life personalities to the screen. They went at each other with intensity that, to a young mind, seemed both wild and wonderful. Later, I saw how the WWF in America took that theatrical style to a whole new level—amplifying the hype, the storylines, and the spectacle.

Fast forward to now, I find myself asking: has professional boxing morphed into wrestling?

Boxing, in its purest form, was once the pinnacle of competitive sport. It demanded sacrifice, discipline, and heart. It was the crème de la crème—unforgiving and glorious. Every fighter who dared to lace up the gloves knew the road would be hard. The missed holidays, time away from family, the aching solitude of training camps… it wasn’t a game. It was a way of life. As the former Commonwealth and European Heavyweight Champion, I carried the burden of those sacrifices with pride. I felt like the boss in my domain, and the next logical step was always to challenge for the world.

Sure, there were rivalries. Sometimes you just didn’t like the man standing across from you. But it wasn’t about theatrics. You didn’t see fighters launching themselves at each other during press conferences or weigh-ins just to trend online. Occasionally tempers flared, but it was rare—and that’s what made it real. The animosity, when it showed, was genuine. Now, every other fight seems to come with a pre-scripted eruption. It’s performative. And that’s what bothers me.

The pageantry has taken some of the sheen off genuine hostility. What once made boxing distinct—its raw honesty—is now layered with antics borrowed from entertainment wrestling. And I get it: we live in an era of clicks, content, and viral moments. But when fighters become actors in a script designed for shock value, something sacred is lost.

Let us be clear, boxers are role models. People look up to their strength, their courage, their ability to rise against the odds and usurp authority. A fighter commands attention not because of what is said at a press conference, but because of what is done under the lights when the bell rings.

And to the boxing world, I offer this thought: let us not lose the essence of our sport in search of spectacle. Boxing doesn’t need to become wrestling to be relevant. It just needs to remember what made it great in the first place—courage, discipline, and the unspoken poetry of two warriors doing battle in the square ring.

No pressure, boxers. But you have a lot to live up to.