Beyond the pale
Even for boxing, recent events have been tough to watch
Welcome to Double Dutch Boxing, a boxing newsletter from Jake Lawton. If you’re here for the first time, you can subscribe below to receive every edition direct to your inbox, and you can also get in touch by replying to this email. Thanks for reading.
Dark days
THE LONG READ
I love boxing, I really do.
Over my lifetime so far I have spent an incalculable amount of time watching, talking and, more recently, writing about this most bizarre of sports.
After recent events, however, I don’t think I have ever felt more disillusioned about the fight game than I do at the moment. Boxing is managing to drive itself underground at a rate we haven’t seen before.
Boxing still does deliver some compelling in-ring action, even if you sometimes have to look quite hard to find it, but the sport has become so adept at burning goodwill it’s a wonder there is any left, even amongst hardcore fans.
More than the despairing, though, is the crushing disappointment - the vision of what boxing could be, and the painful reality that there is no obvious pathway to it ever becoming that. The sport is getting to the stage now where the most interesting element is often the backstage chaos; if we’re honest, that has been becoming the case for years now.
I’ve always adopted a sort of detached perspective about a business which is so clearly broken. Happenings this year, however, have left me considering that stance, as the sport careers from one disaster to another and with perhaps even more serious problems on the not-too-distant horizon. It’s difficult to look away from the reality of how bad things have become.
Just in May, when I wrote a piece called the best of times, the worst of times in the aftermath of the outstanding and historic MSG clash between Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano, there were a multitude of issues on boxing’s plate - not least the US government imposing sanctions on Daniel Kinahan, a story which is far from going away - but there had still been enough positives and progress to at least partly paper over the cracks.
Six months on, and not only is the boxing schedule delivering fewer of the dream fights we thought were on the verge of being made - Crawford vs Spence doesn’t appear to be any closer to becoming a reality, almost a year on from the former leaving Top Rank - but the issues outside the ring have been magnified. Maybe they haven’t, maybe it’s just perception and we are seeing behind the curtain more, but either way, it’s pretty demoralising stuff.
The first of said backstage controversies is of course the total dumpster fire which was the cancellation of Conor Benn vs Chris Eubank Jr., and moreover the attempt to proceed with the event despite Benn testing positive for a banned substance.
You will no doubt be well versed in the case by now. The Daily Mail dropped a story in the week of the fight revealing that Conor had failed a VADA test, with promoters Eddie Hearn and Kalle Sauerland both desperately attempting to push forward with the event on the basis that he had not failed anything with UKAD, the drug testing agency which works with the British Boxing Board of Control.
The BBBofC hastily rushed out a statement proclaiming they had prohibited the bout from taking place, just two days before fight night, at which point all sorts of legal manoeuvres and sanctioning options were reportedly attempted behind the scenes. In the end, Hearn and Sauerland were forced to admit defeat and cancel the event.
The plot has thickened further since then. Benn has now stated that he had in fact failed two tests with VADA in the run-up to the fight, the first one quite flabbergastingly way back in July, a full three months before the fight with Eubank Jr. was scheduled to take place, and the month prior to the show being confirmed.
The level of cover-up involved in Benn-Eubank almost taking place might not be surprising, given it has taken place in the shady sport of pro boxing, but it is still shocking. It also feels like a new low for a sport which ran out of positive vibes a long time ago.
Benn has been hypothesising that the adverse test results were caused by eating eggs and has voluntarily relinquished his licence in the past week. Though the fighter in the spotlight evidently is in the middle of the fire, barely anybody comes out of this without getting burned, with the British Board in damage control and Matchroom and Wasserman attempting to move on as quickly as possible. The only one whose reputation hasn’t taken a hammering is Eubank Jr.
That everyone was so blatantly prepared to brush things under the carpet for the event to go forward means people will struggle to take even less of what they say at face value again. Even if people are not surprised that boxing has a drug problem, the unapologetic, bare-faced ambition of attempting to circumnavigate around the positive tests with so much mainstream attention on the show feels like a new low.
Benn’s situation has been handled very badly, and everything has played out very publicly, but it certainly is not an isolated one. Over the years, many of the leading fighters in boxing have tested positive for PEDs, some have served bans and subsequently continued their careers, most with little impact. The timing has been worse for Conor Benn but this is not a unique case.
It’s not just the pro ranks having to weather the self-inflicted storm, authorities in the amateur code are doing such a poor job that it now looks more likely than ever that boxing will be removed from the Olympics after the 2024 Games.
The International Boxing Association has summarily not heeded years of warnings from the International Olympic Committee, with the IOC ready to cancel boxing due to continued corruption, both in and out of the ring, along with financial irregularities. The last Olympic boxing event was delivered by a special IOC task force to ensure that it could be completed, with the Olympic organisers not prepared to deal with the IBA whilst Umar Kremlev - who has opposed attempts to clean up the organisation whilst moving the IBA’s operation closer to Vladimir Putin’s Russian regime - remains the organisation’s President. A few weeks back, the IBA had an opportunity to confirm a new President, but the national federations vote to not even allow an election to take place and Kremlev remains in post.
This could be the last straw for the IOC, who since stated that they are “extremely concerned” at the baffling situation within amateur boxing. "Following these disturbing developments, the IOC Executive Board will have to fully review the situation at its next meeting…boxing has also not been included in the sports programme for the Olympic Games LA28.”
Boxing’s Olympic departure would have enormous implications for the sport as a whole, completely gutting available funding whilst also ending the hugely valuable platform afforded to fighters who excel at the Olympics before going on to become stars in the paid ranks. I’ve written in detail before about just how vital the Games are for fighters, promoters, broadcasters and fans in the past, and how many of boxing’s biggest stars have the Olympics to thank as their launchpad.
Without the Olympics to aim for, the future of the grassroots of the sport would be murky at best and boxing as a whole will be substantially worse off. The hope is that some sort of solution can be found before the sport is struck off the Olympic list, but this is very far from certain. Once again, this serious situation is almost entirely self-inflicted.
While Rome burns in both the pro and amateur codes, the matchmakers are only able to fiddle rather than deliver most of fights fans are desperate for at the elite level of the sport.
There was a time not so long ago when it looked like late 2022 could feasibly serve up both Terence Crawford vs Errol Spence AND Tyson Fury vs Anthony Joshua (in the absence of Oleksandr Usyk), or at least one of the two. This is boxing, though, so both have blown away in a bluster of backstage politics, enforced deadlines and broken dreams for a sport which could desperately do with some positive news stories.
Crawford, who left his deal with Top Rank after defeating Shawn Porter a full twelve months ago with the express purpose of securing the mouth-watering undisputed welterweight title fight against Spence, will now fight David Avanesyan on a totally obscure pay-per-view platform called BLK Prime in December.
Talks to deliver Spence-Crawford in early 2023 are reportedly still ongoing, but excuse me for not being completely confident on a positive result when the main current action we are seeing is two of the outstanding fighters of their generation squabbling about why the deal fell apart on Twitter.
Elsewhere, Tyson Fury is now defending the WBC heavyweight title against Derek Chisora, a fighter who should be nowhere near a world title fight but is suddenly supposedly a legitimate challenger.
With Oleksandr Usyk injured, Joe Joyce (undoubtedly now one of the top five active heavyweight boxers today and supremely impressive in defeating Joseph Parker) would be the obvious next opponent for Fury, if the dates can be made to work, and it doesn’t hurt that they share Frank Warren as their promoter. Now that Joyce is the ‘interim’ WBO champion though - in itself a spurious title - he won’t even be ranked by the WBC. Chisora recently appearing in the WBC’s rankings out of the blue made it clear what direction team Fury was aiming to go in.
Let’s hope we get Usyk-Fury in 2023. Given the reaction of the latter to very legitimate questions from True Geordie this past week, perhaps even Tyson knows deep down this fight shouldn’t really be on the agenda…
Fury and Chisora isn’t a fight which would be happening if boxing had a transparent ranking system, but the show has apparently sold 60,000 tickets already so what do I know. The more cynical side of me thinks part of this could have been driven by professionals using bots to buy prime seats up and flood the secondary market, but maybe I’m wrong and there is a genuinely huge surge of interest.
At a time when boxing is so splintered across promoters and TV partners, rarely getting much mainstream press coverage aside from the negative kind, and without the overall governance to effectively and regularly deliver the fights people actually want to see, the sport could do with serving up some of the best potential bouts.
It appears that we might get Ryan Garcia against Gervonta Davis at some point soon. Although it might not be seen as big a fight as some of the others previously mentioned, it is an excellent match-up and could even be the biggest out there amongst the younger, social media-savvy audience. Although this is boxing so who knows what is bluster from the respective teams and what is a genuinely encouraging sign…
Boxing in 2022 remains on numerous platforms, despite being a niche sport, but it could be so much more if it had a structure which would allow it.
Is there any hope? There is always hope, even in an industry as muddled as boxing.
In most cases, the females of the sport are consistently showing up the men (or at least the men’s promoters); clean, elite-level athletes in well-matched fights as part of exciting and well-matched rivalries. Isn’t that what got us into boxing in the first place? In part due to the fact that the money isn’t there yet for one-sided contests as it is for the top-level men, the females have been delivering the best possible matchups even if their male counterparts are often not. Claressa Shields and Savannah Marshall headlining an all-female event at the O2 Arena in mid-October was undoubtedly another huge moment, and one which brought with it much-needed positive headlines.
Katie Taylor also looks likely to bring a major event to Ireland next year, whether it is the Amanda Serrano rematch or any number of intriguing different options. In the women’s side of the sport, you are also genuinely confident that these fights will be made.
The sport does too remains incredibly busy. Two weeks ago, I watched boxing events from Brisbane, Australia, the Barclays Centre in Brooklyn, London’s O2 Arena, and finally the Rod Laver Arena in Melbourne; this past weekend it was Katie Taylor at Wembley and Vasyl Lomachenko in New York (plus Paul-Silva in Ohio, if that counts). There’s a potentially excellent Matchroom card this weekend headlined by Dmitry Bivol vs Gilberto Ramirez, and the González-Estrada trilogy fight in early December is pretty unmissable. Boxing does still offer exciting action, sprinkled in between the controversy.
For the more casual boxing viewer, however, who needs the really big events to deliver and act as a gateway for them to consume a wider variety of shows, why bother dedicating yourself to other events when the Benn-Eubank fiasco has only just exposed the black heart of the sport?
When I first started Double Dutch Boxing, I made it clear that it would be covering the good, the bad and the ugly of the fight. Recent events seem to have pushed the last two elements of that trio to the fore. Surely, surely at some point boxing cannot just proclaim “nothing to see here” as an ever-growing laundry list of major issues builds up. At some stage, in the eyes of the wider world, the murky dam of self-inflicted issues will have to break.
The phrase “due to lack of interest, tomorrow has been cancelled” springs to mind - if boxing isn’t able to get its house even slightly more in order and stop pushing people away in the process, the future of the sport as a major concern is very much in doubt.
THE NEXT ROUND
A far-from-exhaustive rundown of upcoming highlights of the boxing calendar…
5th November 2022
Dmitry Bivol vs Gilberto Ramirez
Promoter: Matchroom | TV: DAZN (UK & US)
Let’s try to look on the positive side of things, shall we? Matchroom’s next one should, on paper at least, be a cracker.
Even if there is so much to cause consternation in boxing in 2022, this weekend’s event in the capital of the United Arab Emirates is objectively a deep and well-matched show, a card which puts much of Matchroom’s recent UK output to shame.
This is the first ‘Champion Series’ event, an apparent long-term partnership between Matchroom and the Abu Dhabi tourist board, meaning more of the promoter’s bigger shows will be taking place in the coming years. Given that Matchroom’s more recent UK shows have felt pretty flat with uninspiring cards, and there are presumably considerable financial benefits to the deal, you can see why Eddie Hearn and team have gone down this route. Rumours of tickets not selling great abide in Abu Dhabi as well, however, so perhaps it comes back to that inability to tell the stories in the right way on the right platforms to give boxing’s current era of fighters the opportunity to become stars.
The headliner is an excellent WBA light heavyweight title fight between incumbent champion Dmitry Bivol and challenger Gilberto ‘Zurdo’ Ramirez, the first outing for the former since his coming out party victory against Canelo Alvarez back in May in Vegas. The fight we all want to see in the 175-pound division is, undoubtedly, Bivol and Artur Beterbiev, one of the very best matchups to be made in the entire sport, but with no imminent danger of that happening this is probably the best the weight class can deliver in late 2022. Ramirez is a former world champion at super middleweight who has been calling for a crack at Bivol and his title for some time now, and when the fight was ordered by the WBA in August, Ramirez took the chance instantly, and here they are clashing this weekend - refreshingly straightforward stuff for boxing.
‘Zurdo’ possesses a 44-0 record (with 68% by KO), and he is a legitimate contender with an exciting style, along with power, size and reach advantages, but his record shows that he hasn’t tested himself against too many top-level fighters. Bivol for me is a special talent with an outstanding all-round game who has already proved himself against stronger opposition. This could be another platform for Bivol to demonstrate that talent to the world, so he’s rightly the betting favourite after making so many of the better light heavyweights of this era look very ordinary, and it’s not happening a moment too soon. If Ramirez does manage to penetrate Bivol’s outstanding defence, however, as he has stated he is so confident of doing, then this could be a fight for the ages.
It just feels like Bivol’s mastery of controlling the distance and dictating the pace, combined with his more testing pro experience, will be the defining factor in the end.
The undercard is pretty stacked too, even if an injury did rob us of Joe Cordina’s first IBF junior lightweight title defence. Instead, mandatory challenger Shavkat Rakhimov and replacement Zelfa Barrett face off for the vacant IBF belt in a potentially exciting clash, with the winner expected to take on Cordina next year. In addition, the hugely impressive Olympic gold medallist Galal Yafai - seemingly not too far from a world title shot after just 2 professional wins - faces Gohan Rodriguez Garcia in what is another step up for the former, but also another opportunity for Yafai to demonstrate his elite-level skills.
We are also almost certain to see a new undisputed world champion, with WBC and IBF light welterweight belt holder Chantelle Cameron and Jessica McCaskill face off with the vacant WBO and WBA titles also up for grabs.
Since losing to Katie Taylor back in 2017, McCaskill has gone on to become a world champion in two weight classes, including undisputed at welterweight, with back-to-back wins against long-reigning titlist Cecilia Brækhus, so she’s clearly one of the best female fighters in the world. Though somewhat less experienced, undefeated incumbent Cameron has improved rapidly and looked hugely impressive in recent outings under outstanding trainer Shane McGuigan - with a victory here apparently paving the way for her own fight with Taylor at some stage.
It’s a pure 50/50 for me and another quality match-up from a female code which has been regularly showing the men up this year.
All of this means Bivol-Ramirez has a fair shout for card of the year on paper, though that perhaps is in part a reflection of the state of boxing. It should deliver a strong ratio of worthwhile action, so is definitely one to watch.