Boxing
As of March 2012 when Jeffrey Mathebula won the IBF junior featherweight title, South Africa has produced seventy-one world champions since Willie Smith won the British version of the world bantamweight title. In addition to the universally recognised world champion Vic Toweel, the number contains champions recognized by the major and nonmajor sanctioning bodies, and seventy-one world champions have won one hundred and fourteen titles including thirty-five titles for the four major sanctioning bodies (WBA, WBC, IBF and WBO). South Africa had eight world champions in 1998.
However, according to Jeffrey Mathebula's trainer Nick Durandt who has trained world champions such as Thulani Malinga and Phillip N'dou in his 25-year career, South Africa had not been able to host the world title bouts due to lack of funds, and boxers had been forced to fight overseas for world titles. The Gauteng sports department has been cooperative, but sponsorship and television coverage significantly dropped in thirty years. Boxing matches had not been broadcast on the state-owned broadcaster SABC from early 2011, and only a few cards had been aired on the satellite pay-TV platform SuperSport. Durandt had also mentioned that it is almost impossible to hold fights including world title bouts without SABC's support in their own country. Under such background, as a result of the efforts of Branco Sports Promotions' Branco Milenkovic and others, it was decided that the IBF junior featherweight title bout Takalani Ndlovu vs. Mathebula would be televised on SABC at the last minute.
Read more about this topic: Sport In South Africa
Famous quotes containing the word boxing:
“I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing—for one of those bouts that go on and on, round following round, jabs, missed punches, clinches, nothing determined, again the bell and again and you and your opponent so evenly matched it’s impossible not to see that your opponent is you.... Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.”
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)
“... to paint with oil paints for the first time ... is like trying to make something exquisitely accurate and microscopically clear out of mud pies with boxing gloves on.”
—Brenda Ueland (1891–1985)