Boxing General Nhl

Here in Washington, we all had a few laughs when in between whistles on the jumbotron the home team decided to play a couple of scenes from Rocky IV where Ivan Drago was beating the spit out of the (fictional) pride of Philadelphia. As it turns out, Rocky is a more popular target than one would imagine, as the following video evidence suggests:



The culprits here are a pair of shock jocks from 96.9 CKOI-FM, a French-language station in Montreal.

HT: The 700 Level.

Once in a while, a sport located further down the food chain from the NHL will mistakenly smell blood in the water and attempt to knock hockey down a few links. Remember when indoor lacrosse was on the rise? Or when MLS was going to surpass the NHL, before David Beckham logged more minutes on reality television than he did with the LA Galaxy?

One sport I didn't expect to have hockey in its cross-hairs was professional boxing, which has been as marginalized as a former mainstream sport can become; hell, even horse racing still has the Triple Crown to attract annual attention from the casual fans. Boxing also has something that professional hockey does not, which is serious challengers to its popularity from within its own genre: UFC and MMA, both of which have captured large chunks of younger demographics, as well as valuable airtime on non-pay-per-view television networks -- unlike boxing.

In many ways, boxing and hockey face many of the same stigmas, marketing obstacles in the face of shifting cultural tastes and numb-nuts in the ESPN-ized mainstream media who think "boxing is dead" or "hockey is dead." I wish boxing fans and hockey fans could just get along, like Ilya Kovalchuk and Evander Holyfield in the photo above. Alas, one boxing writer feels that hockey is "the proverbial falling tree in a vacant forest," and that the sweet science is poised to surpass it in popularity -- if it hasn't already.