Notes from the Boxing Underground: Boxing as a Conquered Land

First, before we dive into anything else, it has to be made clear that Saudi Arabia has worked its way into boxing as a colonizer, with Turki Alalshikh as the point man of the colonization.

And, if you know your history, colonizers are never about working to make conquered lands better for the people there. They are about pillaging, stealing, and stripping anything of value from the conquered lands.

That’s what we’re facing when it comes to boxing lands conquered by the Saudis and their thobed Hernan Cortes, Alalshikh.

If you don’t believe me, look back to April 26 through May 3, when Turki held three pay-per-views in those eight days. The May 2 Times Square card in New York was in a fenced-off area with only 300 VIPs invited. The Canelo-Skull fight, on Cinco de Mayo weekend, was held in Riyadh, in an arena littered with empty seats. None of that was for the benefit of us, the actual fans, or for the sport as a whole.

Fast forward to July 12-July 19. There’ll be two Saudi pay-per-views at 60 bucks apiece in those eight days– the Edgar Berlanga-Hamzah Sheeraz card and the Oleksandr Usyk-Daniel Dubois 2 card– counter-scheduled against PBC’s Manny Pacquiao-Mario Barrios pay-per-view event.

If Turki and the Saudis believe any of that is of benefit to boxing or to boxing fans, they are hopelessly clueless.

Fast forward further and even the September 13 Saul Alvarez-Terence Crawford mix-and-match manufactured super fight on Netflix seems more about pleasing Turki’s ego and the Saudi business plan than anything else. If what Oscar De La Hoya said in his Clapback Thursday social media video is true, Canelo-Bud will be taking place in the most decidedly fan-unfriendly daytime hours to accommodate Saudi partner TKO Group’s Noche UFC card slated for that evening.

Again, this is either really, really poor planning or it’s the Saudis not giving a flying fuck about their colonized territory or the people currently inhabiting it.

Now, let’s take things one step further.

What do colonizers generally do when they take control of a new land?

As they drain its resources, they bend the culture and alter the societal structure to better accommodate continued and increased control.

The Saudis started that with the co-opting of Western promoters and the purchasing of boxing media. They declared their intent to further manipulate boxing culture by aligning with TKO Group in hopes of restructuring the boxing business landscape.

The next move would be to change the sport, itself.

Apparently, Turki’s already on that.

“From this point on, I don’t want to see any more Tom and Jerry-type boxing matches where one fighter is running around the ring and the other is chasing him,” Alalshikh tweeted on June 10. “We can longer support these kind of fights with Riyadh Season and The Ring. We want to support fighters who leave it all in the ring and fight with heart and pride!”

Shortly thereafter, it was reported/leaked that the ring for the upcoming July 12 show, which includes defensive specialist Shakur Stevenson vs. William Zepeda, would be significantly shortened down to 18 feet by 18 feet.

Now, realistically, the shrunken ring shouldn’t really have any effect on Shakur-Zepeda or any other fight. Turki’s decree, however, has the potential to turn the sport upside down.

It’s not that more action in fights is a bad thing. The problem is in determining what constitutes too much “running” and how to enforce such a vague directive. This also opens another door to possible corruption and result manipulation as it’s pretty much guaranteed that certain fighters will get much more leeway in being negative than others.

After seeing the non-existent boxing savvy of Turki and the Saudi machine these last couple years, you’d be an idiot to trust their ability to pull off such a delicate and potentially sport-altering rule change.

Even if Turki is speaking in generalities and talking more about which fighters he wishes to showcase in his events, this still represents a huge change in the boxing landscape built around very subjective criteria. With the money and the influence to do whatever the hell they please with the for-sale boxing world, it’s easy to envision scenarios where lower-skill/higher-output fighters are wedged into positions of prominence and more skilled fighters are marginalized.

I suppose it would be too insolent to explain to “His Excellency” that his shitty matchmaking and the mega-inflated purses he hands out are the two biggest contributors to safety-first, take-the-money-and-run ring duds.

At any rate, Turki wants changes…and, so, changes will be made. And, as always seems to be the case, it will be claimed that the moves are to benefit the sport, but they will really only satisfy the whims of Turki Alalshikh and the objectives of the sportswashing Saudis.

As I wrote previously, though, the Saudi takeover will eventually fail. The central logic behind it all is faulty:

“This Saudi Arabian takeover is an inherently losing proposition. The idea of taking boxing to a place where there is no history of it, no real taste for it, and no in-region marketing to make it a success is pure folly, especially when you consider that the Saudis’ big boxing strategy centers around selling the sport back to markets from which it’s been pilfered.”

The monarchy’s patience will will run thin when it comes to Turki’s vanity boxing project and as their colonized territories get larger. The World Cup and other Vision 2030 projects await the Saudis and all of them will prove to be more financially lucrative and infinitely more manageable than the many-tentacled world of boxing.

And that means that, eventually, boxing will be left behind, like an abandoned colony– ransacked, stripped of assets, and left to rebuild.

Then, maybe, we can get things right?

Got something for Magno? Send it here” paulmagno@theboxingtribune.com