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*Fans of NBC’s cancelled reality show “The Contender” can circle July 18th on the calendar, as the series will pick itself up off the canvas that night and go another round on ESPN.
Although low ratings caused NBC to cancel its initial spring 2005 run, the show’s star Sugar Ray Leonard is still baffled upon hearing that folks just weren’t watching the series, which pits boxing hopefuls against each other in a tournament to crown the last fighter standing.
“I honestly feel that the show itself was a success, even based upon what they call the Nielsen ratings, which I don’t really understand,” Leonard told us at the Television Critics Association press tour in January.
“I don’t quite get it. I travel the world, I take my kids to school every day, and the little kids, they knew the names of these fighters. They followed the show.” Leonard said “I was in Europe for about two weeks and that’s all they talked about, ‘The Contender.’ This show was so impactful [sic] that I guarantee you that if [season 1 fighters] Alfonso Gomez or Sergio Mora walked in here, more people would know them than they would know even Sugar Shane Moseley.”
Leonard said one complaint he did hear over and over again about the first season was the presence of the boxers’ children at ringside during their bouts – a problem, he says, that will not carry over to ESPN.
“There were some people who kind of felt that the kids at ringside was kind of a bad thing, and I understand that because I have kids,” said Leonard, adding that back in the day, it was customary for kids to cheer on their dads from the front row.
“My kids were always at my fights, but we’re going to take the kids out so it will be a lot easier to watch for some of the women,” Leonard said of this season.
In the NBC run, executive producer Mark Burnett made a point to draw women viewers to the male-dominated show with sentimental peeks into the home lives of the boxers. But that concept will also be deemphasized in the jump to ESPN next month.
“This time around we’ll be more boxing-specific,” Leonard says. “For our casting call, it was amazing. There were thousands of boxers who tried out to be a part of the show, this tournament. We won’t have the [aforementioned] challenges involved in the show this time.”
Burnett’s original vision for the show was also to repair the image problem in boxing, which included shady deals involving promoter Don King and Mike Tyson’s ear-biting incident eight years prior. Leonard believes the first “Contender,” its puff pieces and all, helped to “humanize the sport.”
“I think we accomplished what we set out to do and that was to tell the stories of these boxers – behind the scenes, their families, their loved ones or why they’re doing what they do,” Leonard said. “People have more of a vested interest in these boxers when they know that they are good clean folks and they’re not just all thugs. Boxing is a poor man’s sport, period, and these young men, they have to be dedicated warriors. They have to be able to sacrifice and be totally committed because boxing is not a part-time job, it’s a full-time job, and these guys are just like I was – I used boxing as a means to an end.”