Dana White has laid out his vision for boxing, and it involves much less waiting around for fights.
White has bagged on boxing for years for being such a poorly run sport. Some of those criticisms are more fair than others,
but you can’t deny that most boxing events are atrocious to watch. It’s no surprise that most people only tune in for the main event: the broadcasts just don’t respect a viewer’s time.30 minute waits between the end of the co-main and fighter walks for the main are typical, and you’re
lucky if you don’t get a music concert or three different national anthems crammed in as well. TKO boxing partner Turki Alalshikh hasn’t been the one to fix the pacing problem, but hopefully Dana White can with UFC as the blueprint.
“I like when the night moves fast,” White told The Ring leading up to his massive Canelo Alvarez vs. Terence Crawford event. “Right now when you watch a boxing event, they’ll have one fight, then there’s a podcast. Then there’s another fight, and there’s a podcast, and the night gets dragged out. It’s bad enough for the people at home watching on TV. The people that are live, it has to be insane.”
“I haven’t been to a [boxing] fight in years,” he added. “The last fight that I went to was at MGM and it was Tyson Fury and [Deontay] Wilder. It was the worst experience that I have ever had at any event. And that was a great fight!”
If White has his way, all the talking heads blathering on for too long will disappear.
“All the predictions, all the back and forth, we’ve been doing this now for months,” he said. “People wanna see the fight that night. Let’s go. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Let’s get through the night, and make it quick and keep that energy up … because every fight isn’t gonna be great.”
White is co-promoting Saturday’s Canelo Alvarez vs. Terence Crawford fight at Allegiant Stadium, but he’s really looking forward to doing smaller events in the vein of Contender Series.
“It’s frustrating in some ways, like I knew it would be,” he said of this weekend’s event. “Especially diving in head first and being a part of such a big fight like Canelo vs. Crawford. What I really love to do is like my Contender Series.”
“There has to be a a pipeline of young up-and-coming guys. When you think about the late 80s and early 90s, there were so many good fighters. I go back to to Tuesday Night Fights [on USA]. A lot of those guys ended up becoming pay-per-view stars of the 90s. And, yeah, I believe we can do that again.”
“When we get into 2026, that’s gonna be my focus: building stars and future champions.”
