After the recent announcement of Dana White reviving Zuffa Boxing with the help of Turki Alalshikh and Paramount/CBS, Dana White speaks to Max Kellerman on behalf of Ring Magazine to go more in depth about
how his outfit will operate in the world of boxing. Here are some excerpts from White below with the full video interview at the top.
White on his big picture plans to build Zuffa
“A lot of the things I did growing the UFC, the sport and the brand, all the things I liked about boxing and all the things I didn’t like about boxing — I want to get in there and starting putting together fights with not only up-and-coming guys and people we think can be future stars, but it’s sort of morphing into putting on some fights with the biggest stars in the world.
On Zuffa only recognizing Ring Magazine champions, ignoring all major sanctioning bodies
“There will be a Zuffa belt and then there will be a Ring belt, and yes, I will not recognize any of the other sanctioning bodies.
“I’ve seen a lot of talk about people saying ‘oh, he’s talking about doing this and that, that’ll never work,’ well, we’ll find out in the next couple of years. I’m one of those guys that’s going to put my head down for the next couple of years and grind. I’m not worried about what everybody else is doing.
“You got Eddie Hearn going ‘I want to compete with him, I want to do this and that’ — I don’t care what any of those guys are doing. These guys have been doing what they’ve been doing for a hundred years, none of them have any vision, none of them ever think big time or we wouldn’t even be having this conversation if any of those guys were ever a threat.”
On priortizing evenly matched fights
“Yeah, there’s going to be a lot of that, actually. I mean, that’s the whole basis of the show. I want to build competitive fights with up-and-coming guys and it gets to a point when you put on competitive fights early on in guys careers, by the time the become one, two, three in the world there’s no debate whether they are or not.
“When you look at all these different sanctioning organizations, they have the top three guys ranked in the world and a champion, they’re like ‘nah, they’re not as good as these guys over here in the WBC,‘ or ‘that’s not as good as the WBA.’ And then most of those guys never end up fighting each other. Once you make it to the top five in my events, the way that we build them, there is no doubt who the best five guys in the world are in that weight class.”
On how long he expects it to take for his full vision for this endeavor to come to fruition
“I mean, two years. You’ll start to notice a big difference in two years. And one of the things, without sound arrogant, if you look back throughout the last 25 years of me being in the UFC, everything I have said I would do I have done. I don’t just talk and say a bunch of — I don’t babble and shoot my mouth off. When I say I’m going to do something, I do it. And I said I was waiting for the right time to get into boxing, here we are now, and now over the next two years I will put my head down and I will grind and will start to implement my vision on what we’re going to do with our version of the sport of boxing.”
