ITV Can Lead Boxing Back Into Big Time

Look away, abolitionists: boxing is back. The sport some hate to love and others love to hate is about to make a big noise on ITV again after an absence of 10 years. And for that we have The Kid to thank.

There is no doubt Amir Khan's debut on ITV, the last bout of his glorious amateur career, stirred the constituency. Even though his opponent, the great Cuban Mario Kindelan, performed poorly, 4.5 million viewers stayed with it last Saturday night, a million more than watched the dogfight relegation finish to the football season on the BBC the following day. The Kid outrated the entire Premiership. He's obviously got 'it', whatever the murmurs at ringside.

It is ludicrous, not to mention legally contentious, to suggest without evidence - as at least one commentator did last week - that Kindelan did not try in this rematch of his Olympic final with the Bolton teenager on national television in The Kid's home town.

Absurd, too, that cynics might suspect - without evidence - that it was a conveniently spectacular result with which to announce the imminent arrival in the professional ranks of the most bankable prospect in British boxing since Naseem Hamed.

Frank Warren, who promoted the fight but was attending his son's twenty-first birthday party, has paid Khan £1m to turn professional. The first return on that investment comes on 16 July, when Khan appears on the undercard of the Matt Skelton-Danny Williams British heavyweight title fight in a show that has been switched from London to Bolton. It will be on ITV, rather than Sky, where Warren has promoted for 10 years. There would seem to be a connection there somewhere.

Sky, where Warren's promotional contract runs out in June, moved boxing to Friday nights at the start of the football season, arguing that Saturdays are not what they were. Maybe. But there have been other signs that their commitment to boxing has dwindled. Their main boxing commentator, Ian Darke, has been doing more football, for a start, which points to a shift in editorial priorities. And generally, the buzz has been missing from Sky's boxing for a little while. They will no longer be a main provider. Their brief now, I understand, is to cherry-pick big fights.

An industry insider told me last week that Sky realise they're not going to win many new viewers with boxing and the big pay-per-view fights seem to have dried up. So, as committed as Sky have been to the development of young fighters, the figures don't add up for them any more.

Those Khan-Kindelan ratings, ITV's best all weekend, surely determined not only that Khan will remain with ITV (after a flirtation with the BBC) but that ITV will remain with boxing. To put it in context, Celebrity Wrestling , in which ITV have invested such hopes and money, returned a disappointing 2.3m audience earlier in the evening: the rest of the series has been banished to compete with the religious programmes on Sunday morning. Coming on at 9.30pm, Khan-Kindelan pretty much saved ITV's day by securing a quarter of the available audience.

ITV are desperate for a ratings winner in sport, given that Sky and BBC have carved up domestic football, leaving them with Champions League games and Formula One. Their early-evening figures for last Saturday were their worst in decades, according to a TV source.

Warren, meanwhile, has been in serious talks with Sky and ITV for weeks. Sky will show his current star, Ricky Hatton, when he fights the outstanding Australian-Russian Kostya Tszyu in Manchester next month, and that could be the last major boxing show on the channel for a while. Or ever.

Against this background, ITV have galvanised their negotiators to bid hard for Warren's stable of fighters, by far the biggest in Europe. It could be, of course, that he is using ITV's renewed interest to get Sky back to the table. ITV, though, have already made it clear that they have no qualms about boxing: they filmed a documentary on the rising Nottinghamshire super-middleweight Carl Froch during his recent successful visit to the United States and, on ITV2, the Sylvester Stallone-Sugar Ray Leonard reality boxing show, The Contender , has reached the quarter-finals.

If ITV see off Sky, they will resume one of the most successful partnerships in sports entertainment and bring to an end a sabbatical from boxing that began in the most awful circumstances in 1995.

In February of that year Nigel Benn emerged from his memorable collision with Gerald McClellan as the pre-eminent tear-up merchant on Earth. However, McClellan was blinded and crippled and Benn was never the same fighter after the finest win of his career. ITV had no stomach for boxing after that and, after a shocking Hamed ko win over Sergio Liendo the following Saturday night in Scotland, they got out of the sport.

Although the management team of 1995 has moved on, to this day tape of the Benn-McClellan fight is locked away in an ITV safe, marked 'never to be shown again'. It has only turned up in edited form in the early hours on Channel 5.

Yet such had been the interest in the fight - and in boxing generally at the time - that Warren had no problem selling out the Docklands Arena, even though the bout was being shown live in prime time on ITV, where it attracted more than 13 million viewers. You can be sure that Warren has reminded the current regime at ITV of those numbers, and of Khan's potential to match them over time given the right exposure.

Warren made his name with ITV in the 1980s and 1990s, challenging the hegemony of Mickey Duff, Terry Lawless, Jarvis Astaire and Mike Barrett on the BBC. He brought a sense of excitement and freshness to the sport after years of admirable competence by the BBC. He was aided, of course, by the talents of Hamed, Benn, Frank Bruno and many others.

As for Khan's last fight as an amateur, all that you can reasonably, and legally, say about Kindelan's performance is that it was uncharacteristically low-key, certainly at odds with his masterful taming of the ABA lightweight champion Frankie Gavin in Liverpool last month. Maybe the great Cuban is winding down after one of the most outstanding careers in the history of the sport. It is a pity he did not do himself justice. There is still a chance he will return to help the ABA with their coaching of the next young crop of amateurs, and his profile will no doubt generate much interest in the amateur ranks. Few Cubans have done the sport here more favours.