From the mess made of a big Saudi-sponsored boxing weekend, it’s tempting to say that Saudi sportswashing figurehead and Ring Magazine owner Turki Alalshikh doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing. But, maybe, he DOES know what he’s doing and what he’s doing isn’t at all about “making boxing great again.”
Where do we start with Friday’s Ring Magazine pay-per-view card in Times Square, New York?
Well, the biggest WTF came when finding out that this “gigantic” and “historic” event would be taking place in a small, walled-off section of the tourist spot where nobody would be able to see what was going on behind red Ring Magazine tarps.
And if fans from the outside world being cut off from the action wasn’t bad enough, the logistics of the event saw to it that the fans would also be denied access to the inside-the-tarps area, which was populated entirely by a couple hundred VIPs and Turki’s buddies.
So, in summary, the idea was to stage an open-air fight card in the middle of the biggest market in the world…but then wall it off and entirely privatize it so no fans could actually see what was happening live.
Even Times Square veteran wandering attraction, the Naked Cowboy, was puzzled.
“I’m still kind of baffled what the concept is,” he told Lance Pugmire of Boxingscene. “They’ve got one screen in [the enclosed ring area], but we can’t see it, and it’s like they’ve barricaded it from the whole place. Otherwise, I don’t understand. How can you see it? There’s [only] room in there for about 10 people – Saudi billionaires. The people putting on this fight have so much money.”
To make matters worse, a lot of fans and media just kind of got dicked around for the purpose of making the event seem bigger than it was.
According to a Twitter post from Ryan Songalia, a boxing trainer as well as a reporter for Boxingscene, fighters and personnel from local gyms were offered tickets to watch the fights, only to show up and learn that their access was limited to a barricaded traffic island blocks away where they could watch the show on soundless screens. DAZN cameras would frequently cut to those assembled “ticket holders” throughout the telecast to showcase the “energy” of the fans experiencing the event– fans who were not even within clear eyesight of the walled-up ring area.
Media also had serious issues with the way they were treated. At least two credentialed media members told me that they were only informed of being approved for press credentials a couple of hours before the card and that when they arrived, they were informed that they’d have to report to some studio where media could watch the fights on closed circuit.
One of those media members, who chose to remain anonymous, wanted his grievances aired.
“In an effort to sports wash away their involvement in knocking down the Twin Towers,” he wrote to me via social media private message, “the Saudi royals have decided to stop traffic at the world’s most busy intersection in that very same city, to throw a fight card inside of a box that no one can see inside.”
Now, granted, trying to stage an event like this in super-regulated New York City had to be a logistics nightmare, but this is something that Turki and his people had to know ahead of time. The self-defeating mess that saw a stunted life on May 2 seemed more a function of a dubious idea finding no reasonable resistance until it was allowed to fall flat on its face. Who would’ve thought that an impetuous man-child ordering an impossible event to be carried out by a staff of yes men and bootlickers would result in poor execution?
As for the fights, themselves?
They were awful.
Highly-touted Japanese amateur star and Turki pet project Reito Tsutsumi had a tougher time than expected against 1-2-1 club fighter Levale Whittington before eventually winning a 6-round unanimous decision.
Teofimo Lopez defended his WBO super lightweight title via unanimous decision against Arnold Barboza Jr. who, as I predicted in Thursday’s Mail Sack column, was simply not talented enough to win.
Devin Haney won a patience-testing 12-round snoozer against Jose Ramirez that objectively ranks among the absolute worst fights I’ve ever seen. Haney just never stopped jackrabbit-running long enough to land anything or give the slow-footed Ramirez a real chance of throwing anything.
In the main event upset, the only point of intrigue (of the entire card, actually) came in the second round when Rolly Romero knocked Ryan Garcia down with a pair of clubbing left hands. Aside from that brief moment, the fight played out the same throughout the 12-round contest– with Garcia never letting his hands go and Romero stealing rounds by doing, well, something. Romero picked up a vacant WBA welterweight world title with his unanimous decision win.
Personally, I wasn’t that upset with the awfulness of the fights as it was understood that anything good coming from Friday’s card would just be shipped off to Riyadh Season Saudi Arabia cards, anyway. As luck would have it, though, there was not much good that came from the card.
And speaking of not much good…
Boxing fans got a second helping of Turki-brand boxing, direct from Riyadh the following day, when Mexican superstar Saul “Canelo” Alvarez made his debut as Saudi Arabia’s prized boxing possession in their zoo of purchased athletes.
Matched against Cuba-born, Germany-residing no-hoper William Scull on Cinco de Mayo weekend, with 16 Mexicans in attendance (I’m estimating), Alvarez turned in the absolute worst performance of his career in an arena pockmarked with empty seats.
Together, the overmatched, always-running Scull and the flat-footed, risk-averse Alvarez set the Compubox record for fewest punches thrown in a 12-round bout (445), taking the low spot from the widely-panned Shakur Stevenson-Edwin De Los Santos bout back in 2023 (525).
With Haney-Ramirez and Garcia-Romero making their own bottom-tier all-time Compubox low-output marks the night before, Alvarez-Scull finding a way to be even more deadly dull was pretty remarkable in its own right.
During the pay-per-view telecast, DAZN’s Chris Mannix railed against the IBF, whose stripping of Alvarez led to Scull getting their super middleweight belt, and blamed them for the nothingness playing out before the few who cared to purchase the Saudis’ third pay-per-view in eight days.
Lost to Mannix was the fact that Alvarez didn’t HAVE to fight Scull, he CHOSE to fight him (and Turki signed on to the soft touch as a safe signing bonus fight to lead into Canelo-Terence Crawford in September). Alvarez’s status as THE super middleweight champ was not in doubt by anybody and, if the belts don’t matter (as the pre-billing for Canelo-Crawford, listing the bout as only for The Ring Championship, indicates), a paper IBF champ should matter to Canelo’s undisputed status about as much as the IBO and WBU champs do.
At any rate, the Alvarez-Scull track meet was so mind-numbing dull that even the judges were lulled into alternate states of mind, with judge Pablo Gonzalez declaring the bout a close 115-113 contest and judge Danrex Tapdasan seeing it as a 119-109 near shutout, with Alvarez winning, of course.
After the waste of time main event, Turki, with the help of the goblinesque Ring Magazine COO Rick Reeno, awarded a garish gold-splattered Ring Magazine belt to Alvarez and cleared the ring for Terence Crawford and Alvarez to have a stare down, officially kicking off the hype for their fight.
The Alvarez-Scull undercard was also pretty bad, with Jaime Munguia turning in the most solid performance of the past two days in avenging his December KO loss to Bruno Surace via unanimous decision. And even THAT showing wasn’t really all that special.
All in all, this was a pretty shitty (and expensive) boxing weekend with the Turki and Saudi brand stamped all over it (This was written and submitted before the ESPN Naoya Inoue-Ramon Cardenas show in Las Vegas).
The Times Square card was so poorly executed and the Canelo fight so painfully cynical from the get-go that it makes one wonder whether any of this was about boxing at all.
A major market event that no fans can actually see in person, the sport’s biggest box office star fighting half-a-planet away from his fan base…on back-to-back nights, with everything behind a paywall. These are the boxing business moves of someone either wildly inept or someone whose interest is more in line with some other motive.
In Turki Alalshikh’s case, that “other motive” could be the continued sportswashing of Saudi Arabia as they try to turn themselves into the Las Vegas of the Middle East. More accurately, though, it could be Turki working to convince Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman that he’s making a significant splash in that regard with showy incursions into Western territories and the acquisition of Western properties.
It’s been said many times, written many times that Turki and the Saudis are “saving” boxing. But if this weekend is any indication of what it looks like to be “saved,” then please let us fend for ourselves.
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