David Haye's career well be over but boxing's preposterous embellishment will ... - Telegraph.co.uk

Where tech companies can create job titles such as 'developer evangelist' and keep an entirely straight face while doing so. And where months of hot air and hype can be devoted to a single half-hour of boxing.

Not since Muhammad Ali has boxing seen a self-publicist like David Haye. All fighters talk up their chances, but Haye somehow elevates trash-talking to a stratum not dissimilar to where posh breadmaking presently finds itself. In the end, though, Haye was all gab and no jab. One wag on Twitter quipped that those watching on Sky 3D got far closer to Wladimir Klitschko than Haye did all night.

But nor was it Sky's finest few hours. Having thrown plenty of capital at the fight in the form of build-up, preview programmes and promotion, Sky succeeded in drumming up plenty of interest. But having done that, it forgot to make sure people could actually order the fight.

Thousands were left hanging on the end of a phone as Haye and Klitschko embarked on their ring-walks.

Boxing retains a privileged place in Sky's sporting portfolio. A decade ago, Sky tried its luck on pay-per-view football. It didn't work. There was simply too much of it everywhere to justify demanding a one-off expense.

But the rarity of big boxing bouts make them one of the few things that Sky can still charge extra for. Haye v Klitschko cost £15 in advance, rising to £20 on the night.

But having charged the nation's credit cards, Sky was now utterly at the mercy of the show being put on by the two fighters and their German hosts.

The boxing itself, unless you are a connoisseur of the left jab, was fairly forgettable. What really sticks in the mind is what came before it. Boxing build-ups are very possibly the most ridiculous thing in sport.

We had Lennox Lewis – not an especially flamboyant man, by boxing standards – dressed in an alarming top hat and waistcoat, as if he was planning a night of child-catching afterwards. Lasers whooshed across the arena as if it were a Rammstein concert or the Eurovision Techno Song Contest.

The on-stage props – actors sitting in front of cinema screens, black cabs, red phone boxes – brought to mind a David Lynch film, the kind where severed body parts suddenly start raining from the sky. Or Las Vegas as imagined by Werner Fassbinder during one of his wilder Valium escapades.

But it was this pomp and ceremony, rather than the fight, that encapsulated what makes boxing such a spectacle.

Haye's days as a box-office draw may well be over. But the sport, this preposterous circus of embellishment, will continue to draw us in. There is a certain other-worldly life-force to big fight nights that still hooks us, like moths drawn to a flame.

Undeterred by past disappointments, we return for more. To mangle a great phrase: the fault, for these dear brutes, is not in our Sky, but in ourselves.