What have your impressions been of Zuffa Boxing as a promoter in their first year of operations?
Scott Christ
You ever watch the show “Justified”? Without getting into spoilers, the series occasionally portrays instances of criminal forces from The Big City coming down to the Kentucky hill country with their eye on sort of, like, modernizing the drug empires of the region and whatnot. They have their money, their appearances, their belief that these hicks and rubes will be convinced to fall in line and they will take over the region, gloss it up and either chase off the rabble or bend the rabble to its will.
I’ll leave it to you to either watch the show or take a guess as to how it tends to turn out when an invading element comes into not just someone else’s turf, but what really is exceptionally specialized turf that takes more than brute force to take and control.
I never really thought Dana White would actually get into boxing. I had reasons for this. (1) He was busy with UFC, over which he was unquestioned ruler. (2) A promoter like him really needs to be unquestioned ruler. (3) He’d repeatedly “investigated” the idea and come to the conclusion that boxing was unfixable, at least if the gamble was going to actually have to be his.
White is a figurehead. He didn’t have a “eureka!” moment and figure out a novel approach to boxing. The idea has been to gut legislation and have the opportunity and ability to turn boxing into something more akin to UFC. And the money was available for Zuffa Boxing to give it a go, to try and expand the monopolizing instincts that have boosted TKO’s other, already-proven businesses into the boxing world.
The legislation has been in progress. But without the immediate, earthshaking changes to boxing’s foundations, Zuffa has operated like many previous — and ultimately failed, usually quickly — boxing promotional ventures, splashing money around seemingly without a clue on doomed-to-tank ideas that any established promoter would have told you was a shockingly, comically bad idea, like giving Conor Benn all that money. (If White was actually so impressed by his chats with Conor Benn that he thought Conor Benn was the sort of fighter you could build a roster around, as he said, he should really get out of boxing now, because he’s so far off base that it would be tough to “figure it out” from that starting point.)
Some of the results we’ve seen are just what you get from White’s chest-puffing nature and arrogance, and being fair to him, you can see why he’d take that approach. First off, it’s the only personality he has. Second, it has long worked for him. But top boxing promoters, while they may have seemed like bumbling oafs to someone like White from the outside, are sharks. Guys like Eddie Hearn, Frank Warren, and even the more volatile Oscar De La Hoya have survived and thrived in this sport because this sport, for all its chaotic faults, makes a specific sense to those behind it all, and they’ve solidified their place in this world by chewing up and spitting out the pretenders, from the good-natured and well-meaning to the money-throwing ghouls who have stepped into their domain with whatever visions of change they had.
I don’t wonder if Dana White himself will throw in the towel, because first of all I don’t think it’s really his call and second of all I don’t think that’s in his nature. I do wonder if the money men behind the Zuffa Boxing operation may eventually question if the juice is worth the squeeze, or if they reach their “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown” moment with it all. I suspect the idea will get a fair bit more time, but without major changes beyond their immediate control, it’s hard to see this play panning out beyond settling into a mid-level spot in the sport, which isn’t the worst thing by any means, but it’s not what they set out to be.
They picked the fight and it’s not going how they expected. Turns out the locals are a little more resilient and stubborn than anticipated, and they know the land.
Now as an in-ring product, I’ve had no issue with Zuffa. Consistently solid shows, they’ve more or less lived up to their promise of competitive matchmaking with the talent at their disposal, there have been good fights and good cards. Your thought might be that this is all that should matter, but it’s not and we all know that.
Wil Esco
What you make of Zuffa’s first year in the sport really just depends on what your expectations were to begin with. If you actually believed in all their bluster of taking over the sport and ditching the sanctioning bodies in lieu of their own titles, etc, then you’d be inclined to be plenty disappointed on where things are currently at. I, however, always had very modest expectations for Zuffa to begin with as I never saw any clear path to them consolidating enough the bankable talent pool in the sport to insulate them from other promoters. And I still don’t, going forward.
Does this mean they’re just going to immediately wither up and die off? I doubt it. But I don’t see them being anywhere near the power player they’ve portrayed themselves to be, especially if they can’t reliably depend on overpaying for events without the worry of financial losses just because their benefactors can afford to operate at a loss on a whim.
In venture capital terms, I’d categorize Zuffa as what’s referred to as a ‘walking dead’ or ‘zombie’ startup, at best. But even Zombies can eventually die.
John Hansen
Scott mentioned when he sent this to us that it was open-ended by design. So, rather than delve into the in-ring stuff (in short: BOXXER but gross), I’m going to summarize the stock response I’ve been giving to people in our comments section when they say some variation of: “Yeah, sure, Dana White may not be perfect… But, what’s bad about someone trying something different? Isn’t it GOOD to have more people trying to promote boxing? And is he really any worse than the rest of them?”
Stumberg and others have written volumes about White’s lengthy history of building a MMA business on the very worst abuses we saw for over 100 years in boxing and which needed a literal act of Congress to even partially correct. And my biggest impression of Zuffa is outrage over what’s happening legislatively to undo the very, very minimal protections that were put in place for fighters in the last 30 years. White and his political connections are the reason efforts to bastardize and destroy the Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act got traction. He spent years pretending he’d take over boxing, but never really bothered to try until he could do it with someone else’s money and with expectations of the tragically scant protections given to the actual fighting men and women stripped away at the federal level to allow him the same shameful practices in boxing that he used to entrench UFC.
The business model is the very worst parts of prime era Don King and peak money PBC, both of which people seem to, rightly, look back on with contempt. It’s baffling to me how anyone claiming to be a boxing fan sees anything but catastrophe in White’s Zuffa initiative. Or, at least, it’s baffling until I acknowledge when they made their accounts here and take stock of their comment history.
As I write this, the proposed reforms to the Ali act still need to pass the U.S. Senate, which has 20 scheduled days of business remaining until White’s personal connection to Donald Trump becomes worse than useless in getting legislation through it. I don’t want this to turn into a political debate, as the original legislation was bipartisan in origins and in support for passage, but I will say that the results of America’s most recent legislative elections give me the first bit of hope I’ve had all year that the Ali act will survive. Whatever comes of those 20 legislative days will likely take a higher priority for the politicians involved than simply doing the President’s buddy a favor. And, even if it comes up for a vote, several of the people who would be essential “Yes” votes are likely not inclined to do any favors for the President or his friends at all anymore.
Dana has often said to wait and judge Zuffa at the end of the first year. If this cursed initiative to drag boxing back decades dies a glorious death of neglect or rejection? That, plus the dried up money pipeline from Saudi Arabia, might make it the only end-of-year assessment Zuffa ever requires.
Patrick Stumberg
Zuffa Boxing was never going to be a paradigm shift. Putting aside the inherent idiocy of great man theory, White just isn’t the iconoclastic visionary Max Kellerman breathlessly described him as. That was obvious enough even before he so thoroughly stopped giving a shit about the UFC that he failed to recognize the top heavyweight contender, a 20-fight Octagon veteran who also happens to be 6’7″, at a press conference. This is a “promoter” who employed Demetrious “Mighty Mouse” Johnson, one of the greatest hand-to-hand combatants to ever walk the Earth, and was so terrible at promoting him that he traded him to ONE FC and considered shutting down his entire division. There’s a reason his fighters have resorted to larping as Publicly Racist Hulk Hogan to get attention.
The supposedly game-changing ideas they presented, like cutting down the number of weight classes and telling both the sanctioning bodies and their fellow promotions to sod off, were doomed from the start. Dysfunctional though it may be, the structure of boxing is pretty well calcified at this point and the Charge of the White Brigade antagonized the opportunistic sycophants they needed to sway. The best they could have hoped for was a more modest but consistently syndicated Riyadh Season: competitive matchmaking facilitated by Turki Alalshikh’s ungodly budget and spread to the masses by the Ellisons’ growing entertainment monopoly.
That’s what we’ve gotten, more or less, but it seems like their early misplays are coming home to roost. Overpaying for Conor Benn set an unsustainable precedent that likely played a pivotal role in the Shakur Stevenson debacle, limiting their ability to secure true star power, and they don’t have the infrastructure set up to create homegrown stars. Part of the UFC’s success is its combination of a solid pipeline for rising talent through regional promotions, working relationships with major gyms that funnel their best prospects Zuffa’s way, and the prestige to attract established players on the international scene, all of which Zuffa Boxing lacks. Even if they do manage to gut the Ali Act, which basically has to happen during this lame duck period, there’s just no foundation for growth without Alalshikh’s infinite money hose, which appears to be drying up.
I don’t expect some spectacular implosion; TKO is flush with cash thanks to their Paramout deal and they’re clearly not spending it on their mixed martial artists. I just expect things like Clarke vs Billam-Smith and Adames vs Warburton to be the new baseline.
