In 1975 there was almost nobody in America who did not know who Muhammad Ali was. Boxing was front page news in a lot of places and back page headlines everywhere. I don't know the name of a single MMA fighter. There's just no comparison.
Of course there's a comparison. There's an MMA event every day and they all sell out: http://www.mixedmartialarts.com/mma.cfm?go=events.home Boxing fights are few and far between. MMA might not have that one big title fight that boxing used to have every 12-18 months, but they make up for it in volume with all the other events. I'm not into it myself, but millions of people are
Millions of people are into WWF too. That doesn't make it anything more than a passing fad generationally speaking. Marketing can do great things for any enterprise but the limitations are in the ability to penetrate to the mainstream. Boxing had that penetration. None of the things that have followed up on it have achieved the same and none are likely too. Football has that mainstream penetration. If it falters though the odds are that none of the followups will. That's why the NFL is in such a panic now about the concussion issues. They realize that those issues are just the spearhead in a greater argument about whether football itself is unhealthy. Losing *that* argument would likely doom the sport to second-tier status.
