IF YOU BUILD IT BIG, THEY WILL COME
132,274 fans stood shoulder to shoulder in Mexico City’s massive Estadio Azteca. Unlike those Wisconsin freeloaders in 1941, these were paying customers. The event required extreme preparation, including teams of bomb- sniffing dogs and more than 15,000 armed security officers who patrolled the grounds in bulletproof vests. The event, copromoted by Don King and Dan Goossen, also featured a dance act by a trio of Mexican Playboy bunnies, a laser light show and a performance by Costa Rican-Mexican entertainer Maribel Guardia, who more recently has drawn online comparisons to Madonna. Chavez was flown in by helicopter, like a god descending from the skies. Haugen spent the buildup casting himself as the fight’s villain, insulting Chavez at every opportunity. When Chavez dropped him early in the first, the wild Mexican audience already had their money’s worth. Haugen, a 25-to-1 underdog, was hardly in the fight at all. Chavez’s acolytes didn’t care. “They came to party, to drink, to dance, to laugh and to cheer,” wrote Wallace Matthews of Newsday. Chavez’s loyal followers set a record for paid attendance at a boxing event that will likely remain untouched. There’s nothing like a new stadium to grab promoters. For the Dempsey- Tunney bouts, the canny Rickard chose recently built structures, which became part of the hype (and prevented more customers from sitting on soggy pine planks). When Shea Stadium was shiny and new back in the 1960s, it hosted the 1967 middleweight contest between Emile Griffith and Nino Benvenuti. Though it drew a respectable 35,000 fans, the event didn’t turn Shea into a boxing venue, unless you want to count the 1976 boxer-wrestler matchup between Chuck Wepner and Andre the Giant. In more recent times, promoter Bob Arum pounced on the newly built Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas – since renamed AT&T Stadium – to showcase the dynamic Manny Pacquiao.
In 2010, Pacquiao fought twice at the towering Texas venue, drawing nearly 51,000 to see him fight Joshua Clottey, and 41,734 to see him pulverize Antonio Margarito. These were financial successes for Arum, as was Pacquiao’s 2017 bout at Australia’s Suncorp Stadium against Jeff Horn, which purportedly drew more than 50,000 and proved again that Pacquiao was a bona fide stadium attraction. Arum had less success when he christened the sparkling new Yankee Stadium with its first boxing show in June 2010, headlined by the Miguel Cotto-Yuri Foreman bout. The turnout was under 21,000, which could’ve fit snugly into Madison Square Garden, and was markedly lower than the 30,000 Arum had predicted. Still, Arum liked the massive revenue increase the monster-sized venues might offer compared to smaller indoor arenas. But not even Arum could’ve forecasted the way stadium boxing would become so commonplace. Of course, there’d been hints of what was to come. Frank Bruno drew some big crowds to Wembley in his heyday, and the 1993 bout between Nigel Benn and Chris Eubank drew 42,000 to Old Trafford in Manchester. The Klitschko brothers had drawn amazing crowds in Eastern and Central Europe, while Joe Calzaghe did impressive stadium business in Wales. Things accelerated sharply in 2008 when 55,000 fans came out to see Ricky Hatton fight Juan Lazcano in City of Manchester Stadium. Hatton-Lazcano set a new postwar attendance record for a British fight, but it wouldn’t last long. Eighty thousand filled Wembley in 2014 to see Carl Froch’s dramatic KO of George Groves, and three years later an incredible 90,000 hit the same venue to see Joshua defeat Wladimir Klitschko in a modern classic. Wembley was also the site of Fury’s 2022 KO of Dillian Whyte before 94,000 fans, and Joshua’s 2024 loss to Daniel Dubois before an astonishing 98,128. Britain’s postwar attendance records were being left in
the dust, as were the impressive prewar records set in the Len Harvey era. This run of wildly attended U.K. stadium bouts often involved Joshua. His battles with Joseph Parker, Alexander Povetkin and Oleksandr Usyk all scored between 60,000 and 78,000. Fury’s 2022 trilogy bout with Derek Chisora at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium was also in the 60,000 range. The two Conor Benn-Chris Eubank Jr. bouts of 2025 drew 67,000 and 60,000 to Tottenham. Not only were old attendance records being smashed, but so was the old promoter’s rule of not giving one city too much of a good thing. It appeared British fans were now in the habit of filling stadiums. Stateside, Canelo Alvarez also proved to be a major commercial force, setting an indoor attendance record in 2021 when his bout with Billy Joe Saunders drew 73,126 to AT&T Stadium. AT&T was also where 72,300 came to observe the remnants of Mike Tyson against Jake Paul in 2024. In 2025, that marvel of modern engineering near Las Vegas, Allegiant Stadium, saw Alvarez and Terence Crawford set a record for Nevada boxing with an attendance of 70,482. Still, it was the recent wave of Brits who made stadium boxing a cultural phenomenon. Rickard thought the stadium era would end with Dempsey. He never imagined another fighter could draw as well, never mind several fighters in the same era, or that his blueprint would still be followed a century later in the U.K. While American boxing was still largely confined to the Las Vegas casino culture, where fights were treated as a kind of luxury item for big weekend spenders, the British boxing scene has thrived as a mass market, stadium- filling experience built on working-class loyalty. In a way, the Brits took boxing back to the people. It’s been amazing to witness. If Fury-Joshua is the fight that brings the era to an end, then let’s celebrate it. It might be a while before we have another one this big. It’s not every day that giants walk the earth.
AT&T Stadium hosted more than 73,000 fans for Canelo vs. Saunders.
instantly forgotten, except for the crowd. As for the attendance, there was no official count. The estimate of 135,000 was given by the Milwaukee police department. How accurate was the number? We’ll never know. In the summer of 2026, iVB Boxing tried to challenge the record with a free bout between Anthony Olascuaga and Andy Dominguez. But such things are easier said than done. The event, to be held outdoors in San Francisco, collapsed in the planning stages. The post-war years saw a surge in America’s fight attendance, evidenced by big shows at Comiskey Park and other baseball venues. One of the era’s biggest fights was the 1951 rematch between Sugar Ray Robinson and Randy Turpin, which drew more than 61,000 to the Polo Grounds. The Rocky Marciano- Archie Moore bout drew a similar number to Yankee Stadium in 1955, showing that the most popular fighters could still fill a big room. Boxing dipped in popularity during the 1960s and ’70s, but its biggest star, Muhammad Ali, was often featured in stadium settings, including the Houston Astrodome and Yankee Stadium. His rematch with Henry
pulled a page from Rickard’s book by whipping together temporary “pop-up” arenas. These unwieldy structures were basically immense scaffoldings and bleachers erected on hotel parking lots and tennis courts, yet most of the era’s stars fought in these makeshift arenas, including Larry Holmes, Sugar Ray Leonard, Thomas Hearns and Marvelous Marvin Hagler. The Riddick Bowe- Evander Holyfield rematch of 1993 was remembered for the infamous “Fan Man” who parachuted into the outdoor arena at Caesars Palace and disrupted the fight for several minutes. By the mid 1990s, Las Vegas casinos shifted toward permanent indoor arenas, which was nice for the high rollers to stay out of the desert heat and, ostensibly, to keep future “fan men” from plummeting into the ring. If there was ever a case where a stadium made a subpar fight memorable, it would be the Julio Cesar Chavez-Greg Haugen bout of February 20, 1993. Had it occurred anywhere else, Chavez’s easy fifth-round stoppage of Haugen would’ve been filed away as just another of El Campeon’s steamrolling victories. But the fight was immortalized by its incredible setting. An astounding
Cooper, held in 1966 at London’s Arsenal Stadium, drew close to 46,000 spectators, mostly because Cooper had decked Ali in their first bout three years earlier at Wembley Stadium. Though Cooper lost the rematch by TKO in the sixth, he later described the crowd, which set a post-war British boxing gate record that stood for decades, as “bloody marvelous.” Ali’s most significant stadium bouts were his history-making 1974 encounter with George Foreman, which drew 60,000 customers to the 20th of May Stadium in Kinshasa, Zaire, and his late career rematch with Leon Spinks, which attracted more than 63,000 to the Superdome in New Orleans. In 1979, when he was well past his prime, Ali fought an eight-round exhibition with NFL star Lyle Alzado in Denver’s Mile High Stadium. That one flopped, drawing less than 20,000, while the gate couldn’t cover Ali’s $250,000 guarantee. As Las Vegas became boxing’s capital during the 1980s and ’90s, hotels
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