“Nothing sells like sex and violence, so boxing and round-card girls made sense,” said longtime ringside analyst Larry Merchant. Ring girls have been a part of the sport since the 1950s, when casinos in Las Vegas flaunted their showgirls between rounds. “I don’t know if that would be an evolution so much as ignoring a longstanding tradition,” said Kathy Duva, CEO of the promotions company Main Events and one of the most powerful women in boxing. The network never went as far as PBC, though, in eliminating ring girls from televised fights altogether. “There was something a little bit off about putting round-card girls on TV. And the ring girls? “We basically ignored them on television,” Greenburg said. Think of Angelo Dundee imploring Sugar Ray Leonard to come back against Tommy Hearns after the 12th round, or the mysterious bottle that rejuvenated Aaron Pryor in his first bout against Alexis Arguello.
“Some of the greatest moments in the history of the sport happened between rounds,” said Ross Greenburg, the former president of HBO Sports. The two heavyweights of TV boxing, HBO and Showtime, rarely show the ring girls (who some boxing hands call “round-card girls”) on television, cutting instead to the fighters’ corners between rounds. Whatever the case, the development could have easily been lost on the casual boxing fan who has never attended a live event. Was this how boxing put on a friendly face for women?
The announcement came at a time, though, when people were scrutinizing Floyd Mayweather Jr.’s long rap sheet of domestic violence. PBC turned down an invitation to elaborate on the tweet, letting #Evolution stand on its merits. Wasn’t it just a little unfair, though, to single out the ring girls for #Evolution? Boxing is unapologetically primitive, after all: Its athletes dole out brain damage to satisfy its fans’ baser instincts. It was a step forward for the human There are no ring girls. The hashtag was especially bold because PBC, which has also inked deals with CBS and ESPN claimed elsewhere to be “taking boxing back to its roots.” #Evolution suggested that the disappearance of the ring girls wasn’t just better programming. #Evolution,” the company tweeted during its March 7 premiere on NBC. In purging the ring girls, though, PBC was doing more than conserving oxygen. There have been other casualties of PBC’s simplified format, including the ring announcer and boxers’ ring-walk entourages, which had swelled over the years into second-line parades. When PBC returns to the Barclays Center on Friday with a fight between Amir Khan and Chris Algieri, the ring girls won’t be included on the Spike TV broadcast, but they can at least look forward to another free dinner. The Corona duo worked the undercard, but their night was over once the cameras rolled. Al Haymon, the shadowy businessman behind PBC, had eliminated ring girls as part of his plan to bring boxing back to network television. The women shook their long, dark hair extensions. The first televised fight, between middleweights Peter Quillin and Andy Lee, was about to start on NBC. “Shouldn’t you be out there?” someone asked. Backstage at Barclays, they carried paper plates past lukewarm trays of salmon piccata and chicken marsala. During boxing matches, they carried numbered cards around the ring, alerting fans to the upcoming round while the fighters rested in their corners. They wore sparkly white Corona shorts and sparkly blue Corona bras, and their tans matched perfectly, like a terra-cotta glaze. On April 11, shortly before Premier Boxing Champions went live from the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, two ring girls hit the buffet line in the pressroom.