MySpace: Boxing's Online Neutral Corner Gets A Major Player
by Eddie Goldman
NEW YORK, NEW YORK - Hotel bars are usually not good for much, especially in a town so full of would-be drunks as New York. Who wants to sit with a bunch of male and female tourists ordering girly drinks from some squirrelly guys all dressed in black? The best joints have bartenders, all of the majority gender, clad like the dancers in the Hank Williams Jr. video "That's How They Do It In Dixie" (and I know where all these places are, too).
But life is disorderly and even this social rule has its exemptions. Those usually occur when an event is in town, its players of note are staying at this hotel, and you are somehow involved with this event. Since last Saturday night was fight night at the Theater at Madison Square Garden, and the DiBella crew was holed up at the Affinia Hotel near the Garden, that hotel's glitzy bar, Niles, was the place to be, especially if you were covering fight night for FightNightNews.com.
I arrived after doing a late round of interviews on the street outside of the Garden. I met up with three talented and lovely ladies who have become a sort of MySpace Mafia of the boxing world: Bernadette Robinson (http://www.myspace.com/bernapril20), Keisha Morrisey (http://www.myspace.com/keishadivine), and Katrina Walters (http://www.myspace.com/queenofboxing). All three, as I have written previously, have been assisting fighters in getting their stories out to the public via the Internet, and especially through the hugely popular social networking site MySpace.com, whose membership surpassed the 100 million mark Tuesday, August 9.
The "Boxing Queen's" Boxing Trinity (Katrina Keisha and Bernadette)
Inside the bar sat Lou DiBella, obviously still unhappy with the decision in the main event between his fighter, Ike Quartey, and Vernon Forrest, who defeated Quartey in a unanimous if controversial ten-round decision. Quartey and his supporters were also in the bar, not exactly celebrating but also not as distraught and shocked as they were when the verdict was first announced. Also on the scene was Mike Marley, never one to stay away from a place where there are free peanuts (as neither am I).
Ike Quartey, Keisha, David and Fans
Then something unplanned and downright amazing happened. DiBella was buying everyone a round of drinks, but even before the first beer settled in, I asked him, "Why don't you get on MySpace?" We talked a bit about it, he thought about it for a moment, and then he readily agreed. The MySpace boxing queens were already in the house, and it was quickly set up for Bernadette and Keisha to contact his office the following Monday and work out the details.
Right now the DiBella Entertainment profile on MySpace is almost complete and just undergoing some final tweaking. That should be done in a few days. At that time, it will be unveiled to everyone.
The significance will be that DiBella Entertainment becomes the first major nationwide boxing promotional company to set up shop on MySpace. Members of MySpace, where it is totally free to sign up, can opt-in to become a "friend" of DiBella Entertainment, meaning their profiles will be linked to the DiBella Entertainment one, and they will receive messages called bulletins sent out to all the friends at once.
It would be hard to imagine a better viral marketing plan than this, and especially for reaching those most neglected by boxing, the young people who live and breathe the Internet and regard getting information from offline sources as antiquated, untimely, clumsy, inefficient, uncool, and even absurd.
Saturday's Garden show, despite being previewed by the remaining major New York-area newspapers, and headlined by two fights featuring top boxers and loaded with many local up-and-comers on the undercard, only drew 3,012 fans. True, the two top fights were shown live on HBO for no additional charge, Showtime was airing the Marquez brothers' fights live at the same time, and it was unbearably hot in New York during the week leading up to this card. The show was also the third in as many weeks in midtown Manhattan.
But this is also still a big fight town. All someone has to do is mention that I am a boxing journalist and all of a sudden fight fans come out of the closet in droves, offering up their opinions and analyses freely and enthusiastically. (I just spent an hour on the phone with one such friend tonight, when I was supposed to be finishing up this piece!)
MySpace allows for all this to be harvested. It is an online neutral corner, not affiliated with any particular media outlet. Its purchase last year by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation has thus far not resulted in any known interference with people using it however they want, save, of course, for the usual limitations on porn, posting media without holding the copyright, etc. And they have taken several steps to protect teenage members from the highly-exaggerated problem of sexual predators, which the technophobic and dying print and electronic media as well as the censorship-happy politicians of the Republicrat Party threatened by the freedom MySpace offers its 100 million-plus members continue to make a big issue.
The real major problems confronting MySpace revolve around its incredibly rapid expansion. When I joined in April 2005, I was in the 13 million group. When Fox News' Bill O'Reilly discussed MySpace at the end of March 2006 (and had trouble saying the name of the site), it had grown to 66 million members. A little over four months later the site had grown by over 50 percent once again, reaching that 100 million mark.
This enormous growth has been recently accompanied by repeated failures of many of the site's features and even total outages, including a summer weekend when it was nearly impossible to log in. The MySpace boxing forum started by boxing writer Tom Luffman now has over 4,000 members, but has been down for several weeks. He received an e-mail this week from their tech people who said they were aware of the problem and were working on it. It is still, however, down.
Many MySpace users, casual and addicts alike, are already grumbling about the site's seemingly growing lack of reliability. But remember that News Corp. paid $580 million last year to buy it and its parent company, Intermix, and that Google recently signed a deal to pay $900 million to Fox Interactive Media, MySpace's current parent, to handle search and provide text-based and keyword ads for those sites including MySpace. These huge media corporations will not so easily throw away their investments because some servers are down and databases not functioning.
So expect MySpace to be healed, sooner or later (and, hopefully for all involved, before the fall school term and the rush by students back to the Internet begin). Expect the DiBella Entertainment profile to be up and running very shortly. And expect it eventually to reap the benefits of online viral marketing and networking, possibly at least in part as soon as the upcoming Sept. 20 Broadway Boxing double show at the Manhattan Center.
So Don, Bob, Oscar, Gary, Dan, Kathy, Frank, Frank, Glenn and Scott, Cedric, Rodney, Leon, and even Klaus-Peter, Wilfried, and the rest of you around the world: Why don't you get on MySpace?
