Sometimes, it feels like I could be screaming at the top of my lungs, on fire, with bees swarming around me and I still wouldn’t be heard. Hell, who am I kidding, I feel like that ALL of the time.
And, you know what? I’m right.
I’m under no grand delusion that my voice is really being heard. Nearly two decades into this boxing media ride has informed me that, for the most part, it’s NOT.
I don’t say the “right” things, the “right” way. I don’t network well. I don’t schmooze well. I disregard polite protocol. I ruffle feathers. I’m not particularly ambitious in advancing my career….or, I should say, I’m not interested in making concessions to advance my career. I don’t dole out free passes to anyone. If you love me now, I can almost guarantee that you will hate my guts at some point…because I don’t give a fuck about anything other than telling the truth and injecting some degree of fairness into a habitually and aggressively spun public discourse.
Make no mistake about it, though, I’m usually right.
And I’ll be on the right side of history when it comes to my take on the Saudi boxing takeover and the overbearing involvement of Turki Alalshikh, the chairman of Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority.
Since my scathing Turki takedown in last Monday’s Notes from the Boxing Underground, more has happened to prove that I was right all along about this deal-with-the-devil boxing proposition so many boxing entities have blindly, lustfully dived into.
Recent events have unfolded that draw lines connecting Alalshikh and the Saudis to an attempt to work around BoxRec and establish their own record-keeping, apparently via the previously dormant Fight Fax and the WBA, which went out of their way to endorse Fight Fax at their recent WBA Asia convention.
I’ll be lazy and just quote myself quoting someone else from a piece I did at BoxingNews.co:
“Matthew Brown of Brunch Boxing has been all over the story, detailing how FightFax.com was brought back to life on April 24 of this year, on the same day the WBA announced its ‘partnership’ with Alalshikh and the Saudis.
Brown also wrote of the reported attempt from Alalshikh in June to purchase Boxrec.com as ‘part of a broader effort to reorganize the sport’ [after a May 6 tweet that expressed doubt over the accuracy of BoxRec’s ranks].
Given the way this has all played out, it certainly gives the impression that the Saudis, unable or unwilling to buyout BoxRec, have set out to replace them, using the WBA as the facilitators of the record keeping replacement.”
Also quoting myself from the same piece:
“In the present tense, this particular WBA/Saudi/FightFax situation would have further-reaching implications, given the Saudis’ recent purchased influence in the sport.
Saudi Arabia currently has “partnerships” with promoters Golden Boy, Top Rank, Matchroom, Queensberry, the streaming service DAZN, and the WBA and WBC. Through those “partnerships,” much of the boxing media would also be caught up in the net of conflict.
In a worst-case scenario, these conflicts would lead to the boxing equivalent of a constitutional crisis, where a splintered and often conflicted sport would become even more splintered and conflicted. Not even “official” records would necessarily be taken as accurate anymore. Anything reported by the mainstream boxing media would have to be seen as questionable.”
Corrupting info-gathering resources is the first step in any hostile takeover and it’s directly from the How to be a Dictator 101 textbook. In a sport like boxing, something like that would strip the last shred of integrity from an already barely credible sport.
(I reached out to Fight Fax to clarify their funding source and general chain of command, but have yet to hear from them. Of course. And I’m not expecting a response. Who the hell am I to be asking such questions? Why can’t I just be compliant like Dougie?)
But with boxing business people making easy money from Saudi “partnerships” and fans distracted by shiny promises of big fights, nobody is considering the long-term impact of handing the keys to a murderous regime that is beyond all accountability, using the sport as a reputation-laundering outfit.
Concerns for the future of boxing notwithstanding, there’s just something cuck-ish about all of this sold deference to, essentially, one chubby guy whose actual working knowledge of the sport is on the level of a regular fan, at best.
And, yeah, a real man (and a real boxing fan) should bristle at the notion of Vergil Ortiz Jr. being forced into a rematch with Serhii Bohachuk after beating him Saturday night and earning passage to Terence Crawford, simply because Turki said so (after Turki proposed the Crawford fight in the first place).“It was a great fight. I thought it was a draw,” Alalshikh told FightHubTV after Ortiz-Bohachuk.
“No, Crawford, we have a thought about it. Ortiz, we could support to have a rematch like this.”
And that means, since he has all the monkeys dancing before him, he’ll get his wish.
Well, this monkey ain’t so much for dancing. I’m more of a “hurl your turds” kind of simian. So, expect some messy trade from me in the coming weeks/months/years– even if very few people are actually bothering to listen.
Got something for Magno? Send it here: paulmagno@theboxingtribune.com
