Boxing is far from dead. The amateur game in the US is hurting because there are so many opportunities, thus the poor performance at the Olympics.
Top matches regularly make 50-100 million on pay per view. Showtime, Fox Sports, HBO, and ESPN have regular televised matches.
While the judging is still suspect, I posit that it’s no more than in the past.
There is an influx of new fighters from eastern europe, asia, and even the middle east, most of them training and fighting in the US.
I do agree that there are too many organization granting belts, that’s the thing that needs changing and some improvement of judging.
I don’t know if any sentence with the word “regularly” really applies to top matches of boxing given how irregularly they happen. Sure the once every 2 or 3 years the egos manage to allow a marquee match up to occur it gets a huge audience. But what about between then? Yeah you’ll get some small action periodically, I know ESPN used to have Friday Night Fights but I can’t remember the last time I saw a promo for that, but all that stuff features guys only the most ardent fan has heard of boxing 3 rounds. The guys people have heard of, they guys with at least one federation’s championship belt, box as rarely as possible, which is incredibly rarely these days when the agents manage to make sure both guys get in excess of 20 million bucks win or lose.
The real crookedness of boxing isn’t in the judging, it’s in the creation of the matches. It’s in deciding that this boxer is on the championship track, so he’s gonna get a bunch of easy matches to build that unreasonable record of 3 dozen wins and a few losses, he’s going to be get the publicity, and eventually he gets a shot at one of the many titles with of course a guaranteed purse of many millions even if he gets clobbered in the first minute.
What really needs to change is for boxing to develop a league and a season like any other sport. Doesn’t necessarily need to be annual like other sports, boxing is pretty rough on the body, but some way to be able to say “these are our boxers, this is their schedule for fighting each other, this is how they will be eliminated from championship contention, this is the date the championship fight will happen, and 6 months later we start the whole thing all over and the champ has to box the schedule just like everybody else”. That would eliminate where the corruption in boxing really is, the scheduling.