Following Max Kellerman’s little on-stage dust up with Canelo Alvarez in a boxing vs MMA debate, Kellerman talks to the media about what transpired and explains why his position is correct, even if Canelo has a different perspective. Here’s some of what he had to say below.
“Look, Canelo is the face of boxing so of course he feels a certain way about it,” Kellerman said. “But does anyone dispute that boxing is not as big as it used to be? It’s not…It’s different in Mexico, obviously, and I even said before
that Mexican and Mexican-American fans have kept boxing alive in North America. So Canelo from Mexico, of course, has a different experience ‘cause you walk down the street in Mexico and the average person knows who the champion is. In the United States they do not.
“So the reason for that is there is no they there. ‘Hey, you know what they should do in baseball?’ — you’re talking about Major League Baseball. ‘You know what they should do in basketball?’ You’re talking about Adam Silver and the NBA. There’s a thousand basketball leagues but there’s one that is synonymous with the sport.
“‘What should they do in MMA?’ They is Dana White. And MMA and UFC are used interchangeably…Boxing has never had that. So my point is we have a chance for the first time in my life — which is why I’m involved with this, because I think there’s historical moment where there’s a chance it could work — between Turki Alalshikh and Dana White and Nick Khan, who’s the most effective executive I’ve ever even heard about, let alone seen, that what Canelo vs Crawford is kicking off could actually result in a golden era for boxing because for the first time we could have a they there.
“Now it’s an economics lesson…Markets are very good at allocating resources in the short term. That’s why capitalism works better than other systems because it allows the marketplace to make decisions, effectively. However, you do not want laissez-faire capitalism, meaning there are no restraints anywhere because why don’t you want that? Because marketplaces are very good at allocating resources in the short term but over longer horizons markets don’t really take into consideration much the future. They are reacting to right now.
“So if you want a league or a sport to grow, you need to make plans. And the issue with boxing has always been it’s a laissez-faire marketplace…Every promotion is trying to juice the fans for everything they got, which is why now only a handful of fans are watching on PPV. The prices keep going up because the marketplace is shrinking because we haven’t exposed it to the mainstream because we takes these fans and $100 for a PPV — come on, man. And half the time the fights aren’t good, right?
“That base gets smaller and smaller and as it gets smaller we charge them more to make the profit, right? That has not worked. It’s dried boxing up, it’s moved it to the margins. So you want some kind of central authority, just like you need a government — you can’t just leave it up to a marketplace…That’s what we need in boxing, we need someone to make plans.”
