The heavyweight title fight between Wladimir Klitschko and David Haye was a big deal, on this side of the Atlantic. I’m sure it was not nearly as big an event on the American side of the ocean — which is a major problem for global boxing.

After years of wrangling to set up the fight, the younger of the fightin’ Klitschko brothers met Haye in Hamburg, Germany, last night.

How did it turn out?

It was Klitschko in a unanimous decision, in a fight that was a fairly severe disappointment.

Haye was unable or unwilling to take the fight to his 6-foot-6 opponent, and the fight droned on through the scheduled 12 rounds. One judge gave 10 of 12 rounds to Klitschko. So did I, actually, while watching it early this morning here.

In a comment piece I did for The National, I suggested that the fight was damaging for the sport of boxing, which seems to be on a steady slide towards irrelevance for several years now.

Haye had seemed to promise mayhem, but he didn’t deliver.

He was fairly insulting towards Wladimir Klitschko in the run-up to the fight, and the big Ukrainian, who divides his time between Los Angeles and Germany, took some of it personally — which Haye intended.

What went unappreciated in many locales was how Haye’s line of patter before the fight helped make it a major event. The Klitschkos (Wladimir and Vitali, who also has a piece of the heavyweight title) don’t sell fights. They just win them.

One statement made by Haye to Klitschko came very close to summing up the plight of the heavyweight division.

To wit: “You and your brother have single-handily killed heavyweight boxing. You’re boring. I’d rather watch paint dry than watch you fight. You’ve killed boxing. I’ll have to revive it.”

Haye didn’t quite revive the sport. If anything, he hurt it with his limp performance.

But he is otherwise right about the Klitschkos, who are so clinical in their fighting and so vanilla personally, that the sport is drowning in a sea of ennui.

It would help things if the U.S. was producing any competent heavyweight boxers, but after more than a century of churning out contenders, the U.S. has run dry.

That has left the sport’s glamor heavyweight division in the hands of Eastern Europeans, few of whom are particularly interesting.

In the U.S., and in much of the world, fight fans are down to one matchup that they would like to see: Manny Pacquaio vs. Floyd Mayweather Jr.

After that … lots of zzzzzz.