Really, the reports of its death were not greatly exaggerated.
This past spring, even as the Floyd Mayweather Jr.-Oscar De La Hoya fight set records for money and viewership, boxing looked to be in fatal decline.
Not only was its last crossover star — De La Hoya — in the final stages of his career, not only was the heavyweight division an unfixable mess, but for the first time there was real competition for the blood-sport dollar.
The people who ran the Ultimate Fighting Championship had arrived at what seemed a fail-safe formula. Deliver caged combat in bite-size pieces. Build your own supply of marketable attractions using a free television reality show and then plot their ascendance through the ranks. Play to a younger generation that didn't care about boxing's glorious history, and had been turned off by its confusion of champions and regulatory bodies and competing promoters.
The UFC was one business, run by one guy, not a great capitalist free for all. Dana White and his financial backers understood the fundamental advantage that arrangement provided, and ran with it.
Two weeks after Mayweather beat De La Hoya, the UFC staged the biggest card in its history, when Chuck Liddell met Quinton Jackson at the very same Las Vegas casino. In the moments before that main event, it felt like the torch had been passed.
What's happened since, though, has at least changed the arc of the story in which the smarter, hipper guys pound a stake through the heart of a sport that has somehow survived for the better part of 300 years.
Liddell, the UFC's number one attraction, lost. A few months later, he'd lose again. For all of its great star-building machinery, mixed martial arts faced the same issues as boxing when a bankable champion bites the dust.
More significantly, the only mixed martial artist who might rival Liddell at the box office, Randy Couture, abruptly retired, and then entered into a very public feud with White about whether or not he'd been fairly paid.
That was always the UFC's potential Achilles heel: when it evolved into a de facto monopoly, and the returns grew exponentially, the fighters themselves were naturally going to demand a bigger piece of the action. They weren't organized, they didn't fight very often, their careers were short, and the game was both painful and dangerous. Forget those bonuses for the best fight of the night: the guys putting their bodies on the line and selling all of those pay-per-view sign-ups were inevitably going to start biting the hand that fed them.
Meanwhile, the dying sport of boxing was refusing to expire just yet. Though De La Hoya-Mayweather didn't do much for the casual fan, and the heavyweights continued to be a confusing mess (unless, that is, you were a resident of some part of the former Soviet Union, which right now accounts for all but one of the alphabet title holders. Boxing promoters used to pine for a Great White Hope. They've got plenty of those at the moment, but would much prefer an American of any hue) the lower weight classes produced a series of excellent fights.
This fall has seen the exciting, marketable Kelly Pavlik get up off the canvas to knock out Jermain Taylor and win the middleweight title, and Joe Calzaghe fight masterfully in front of 50,000 hometown fans at Cardiff's Millennium Stadium, defending his super middleweight championship against the previous undefeated Mikkel Kessler. Both bouts were a bit under the radar of the general public, perhaps, but great stuff for the cognoscenti.
Best of all may be what's taking place tonight at a sold-out Madison Square Garden, where undefeated Puerto Rican welterweight champion Miguel Cotto defends against veteran Shane Mosley. It is the classic matchup of a puncher versus a great technician, a crossroads fight between boxers a decade apart in age. If Cotto wins, which is far from a sure thing, he'd be the ideal opponent for what figures to be De La Hoya's last fight next spring.
Now, if this were the UFC, they'd be able to tell you what was coming next, who would be fighting whom, they'd be able to build stars and dictate how the plotlines evolve. Boxing can't do that — it's still every promoter for himself — and that remains a huge business disadvantage.
But while MMA offers only short stories, boxing can still on its best night deliver a novel, as it has several times this year.
Maybe that doesn't mean what it once did, not in this world of perpetual shorthand. But there are still some who, on a night like tonight, are more than happy to curl up with a good fight.
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