A surfeit of heavyweight titles and champions since the days of Muhammad Ali v George Foreman or Joe Frazier means the sport has fallen from the forefront of public attention

It is impossible to imagine the impact Muhammad Ali would have made on all our lives were he born into the current era of heavyweight boxing. Certainly, he would have put the world title fight in Los Angeles between Deontay Wilder and Tyson Fury into sharp relief.

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The current combatants should clear more than £25m between them, way more than Ali ever earned for a single fight (he famously split $10m with George Foreman on his best payday, for the Rumble In The Jungle in 1974), but his worth could never properly be measured in cash. As Tiger Woods was once to golf, Ali was to boxing – and beyond. We all had shares in the most famous individual in the world.

In nearly any other period of the sport’s often chaotic history, this weekend’s fight (Sunday 5am GMT/Saturday 9pm PST) would have been frontline news every day for a month, from Argentina to Zanzibar. It has not been quite that – although interest was ramped up with another predictable set-to at the final press conference – which describes the transformation of boxing from global phenomenon to hardcore but still lucrative sideshow.

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Any heavyweight fight generates excitement because of the possibility of painful carnage, which is what most fans pay to see. For some time and with increasing regularity, however, they have done so through pay-per-view, a ticking revenue generator that has spread ineluctably across a range of traditional and modern gadgets. If we owned Ali, the TV companies and their offshoots now own us.

BT Sport, Showtime and their YouTube and Facebook outlets have this one covered, which is fine for fans who have £19.95 to spare or live within driving distance of the Staples Center, which houses 21,000, but was 4,000 short of that maximum at the start of the week.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Shane Mosley celebrates after defeating Antonio Margarito in their 2009 WBA welterweight title fight. Photograph: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters

Antonio Margarito and Shane Mosley drew 20,820 to the venue in January 2009, still a record there. The arena, home to the city’s two basketball franchises, will be full on the night, probably, and it could be a great fight, although Fury will do his best to bore Wilder to the point of exasperation over 12 rounds. If there is to be a shock, that will be it. Wilder knocking out his 40th opponent is the more likely outcome, probably in the middle to late rounds.

Stephen Espinoza, Showtime’s president of programming, inadvertently gave the game away about the state of the business when he said at the final press conference: “Heavyweight boxing is indeed back. Showtime has done 14 heavyweight world titles in the last four years. This will be our third this year.” What he did not say was that, 40 years and more ago, those occasions would have been fewer and more special.

If we take John L Sullivan’s seven-year reign from 1885 as the starting point of universally recognised world champions, the heavyweight division had ONLY one ruler at a time until the last quarter of the last century. Pre-television, the world stopped to find out who won between Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney – and more than 225,000 fans paid at the gate for their two fights, in 1926 and 1927.

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It will surprise not even a mildly curious student of the game to learn that the toweringly anonymous Manuel Charr (once a putative challenger for David Haye) counts himself as a successor to those great champions, as the WBA’s “regular” title-holder – alongside Wilder (WBC) and Anthony Joshua (WBA “super”, IBF and WBO). It is beyond parody that one world can have more than one claimant to a title pretending to be the only one that matters.

In our lifetimes, Ali was the single most persuasive reason to regard boxing as the biggest show in sports entertainment. He had for company some splendid company in Foreman, Sonny Liston, Floyd Patterson, Joe Frazier, Larry Holmes, Ken Norton, the Spinks brothers and a supporting cast of several handy contenders.

When Ali and Frazier fought for the first time, at Madison Square Garden in 1971, it was billed as the Fight Of The Century. There was no disputing the tag, before or after. It was like the moon landing in worldwide impact. It was bigger than the Olympics, the World Cup and the Super Bowl.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Joe Frazier is directed to the ropes by referee Arthur Marcante after knocking down Muhammad Ali their title bout in Madison Square Garden in in 1971. Photograph: AP

There was a newspaper strike in New York that week, which threatened to put a hole in the hype – but Ali single-handedly sold it, roaming the streets of Manhattan to drum up trade. The interest was so intense that even a lack of ink in one of the great newspaper cities did not affect ticket sales. Norman Mailer crashed one of the press conferences – drunk; Frank Sinatra took photos at ringside for Life magazine; Diana Ross was thrown out of the ringside press seats. There was not a hotter ticket in town. Any town.

Boxing had to wait for the electricity of Mike Tyson to get excited again. Lennox Lewis, an excellent champion, never quite raised the temperature outside the UK, nor did the Klitschko brothers, and we all ambled on to the present, where Joshua, Wilder and Fury wear the crowns.

Joshua has proved over the past couple of years what a phenomenal draw he is in the UK, the sport’s only genuine “stadium fighter”, capable of filling Wembley and the Principality Stadium to their capacity levels of 80,000 and 90,000 four times. That is an extraordinary achievement. If he fights the winner of Wilder v Fury next summer, he will do those numbers again. And then we’ll have a proper, undisputed world champion again – whatever Mr Charr might think.