Though a long-time admirer of boxing’s raw appeal, Dana White regularly criticised the makeup of the sport for several years before he entered the marketplace with promises to reinvigorate a tired championship system.
“I've been talking smack about boxing for a long time, and now it's time to put my money where my mouth is,” he confirmed in January. “I'm gonna get rid of the sanctioning organizations. The best will fight the best. We're going to sign all the young, up-and-coming guys.”
The only problem with promises like that is when they’re followed by last week’s “BIG ANNOUNCEMENT” that Zuffa Boxing’s first champion will be crowned at cruiserweight when division leader Jai Opetaia takes on fringe contender Branton Glanton. Opetaia is priced at an unbackable 1/18 to win. Not exactly a new dawn, then. Merely an all-too familiar one.
Opetaia-Glanton is no better than the myriad ‘world title’ fights we’ve seen that match a top-class fighter with someone nobody of sane mind would pick to win. The type that White, while championing the merits of his UFC brand in the not-so-distant past, would surely have ridiculed. Even Max Kellerman can’t claim to have been dreaming his whole life about this one.
“What’s really interesting about this fight, [Glanton] has never been stopped,” White said. This is true, if not necessarily interesting. Glanton’s three defeats to David Light, Soslan Asbarov, and Chris Billam-Smith all came on points. What’s also true is that Glanton, irrespective of any iron cladding his chin might possess, has never beaten an opponent anywhere near Opetaia’s level. Whichever way you spin it, this is an underwhelming fight. Had the WBC mandated it, for example, the outcry would have been deafening.
The situation that White finds himself in has been a long time in the making, however.
In 1983, with the WBC and WBA already firmly entrenched in the system, the IBF staged their first title fight when Marvin Camel, a former cruiserweight WBC champion, was paired with Roddy MacDonald, a foe even more undeserving than Glanton. Before long the IBF were throwing belts at more established stars like Larry Holmes, Donald Curry, and Marvin Hagler to validate their presence. Five years later, perhaps spurred by how easy the IBF’s entry was, the WBO came along.
And so began the ‘four-belt era’ that today is misinterpreted by certain marketers as some kind of golden era because every now and again it will crown an ‘undisputed’ champion. Indeed, the extra titles up for grabs might have been sufferable had every weight class used those four belts, tournament style, to ensure the owners were systematically forced to fight each other. We know that didn’t happen nearly often enough. What happened was more and more belts were welcomed – interim, silver, gold, regular, super, stupid – to further compartmentalise the system and leave belt-holders all but ringfenced. When those ‘undisputed’ fights did happen – and there’s been a dozen at most in the last 38 years – they were the exception that proved the rule: The four-belt era is utter chaos. Frankly, it’s a surprise it has taken this long to wait for someone to come along and state the bleeding obvious.
The chance to reset and rebuild should have been taken before now. Back in 2021 when Eddie Hearn was plotting a world takeover, he was asked what could be done to reduce the number of belt-holders in each weight class and make boxing simpler for the masses to follow. “You create something that is bigger than the sanctioning bodies,” he told me. “I’m the only person capable of doing that. There is no one else. I am the only one that has the balls, the energy, the vision to do it.”
Yet for the next five years, Hearn – like all his promotional rivals – preserved the existing system by facilitating the rankings bodies at every turn. That’s not necessarily the fault of the Matchroom promoter, it’s merely evidence that even the most ambitious will struggle to shift bad habits so ingrained they’ve become the norm. Or at least they have inside boxing’s bubble – and that’s all we operate within, a tiny bubble – whereas outside, the hundreds of millions of people who regularly consume other sports have long stopped caring what all these titles mean or stand for.
The WBC’s recent woes only underline the mess. Shakur Stevenson’s refusal to play by their rules when fighting for a rival organisation’s belt would ordinarily not cause a stir. But after Terence Crawford voiced similar frustration only two months ago, one can sense the vultures circling above the heads of the most influential sanctioning body in existence.
But to blame only the WBC for the sport’s failures is missing the point. They might be the biggest and loudest of the four but they’re also the most proactive. At least they’re trying.
If you’re to criticise Mauricio Sulaiman for his Clean Boxing Program, then you should also ask the other sanctioning bodies, and even some commissions, exactly what they’re doing to combat drug cheats. At least the WBC insists on VADA testing even if it’s somewhat ironic that Conor Benn, a fighter who fell foul to one of those tests, is now ranked at No. 1 by the WBC in a division he hasn’t competed in for four years. But though the decision to rank Benn No. 1 at 147lbs is preposterous, why isn’t the IBF – supposedly the strictest of all alphabet groups – also being made to justify their lofty placement of Benn at welterweight?
Bottom line: The rankings and policies of all four groups are flawed because those rankings and policies are designed, in part, to be in direct competition with those of rival bodies. The lack of uniformity is mind-boggling to even the most hardened of fans.
Though it’s understood that Zuffa Boxing is positioning itself as much more than just a belt-awarding association – the designs are so grand, in fact, a complete renovation of the sport is being plotted – it’s going take far more than another belt, and another average fight, to convince us that anything will be different.
The key, as Hearn identified long before White’s arrival, is to create something better than what is already on offer. The alphabet groups have long shot themselves in the foot by going out of their way to acknowledge the presence of other alphabet groups. For example, a WBO champion, or even a mandatory contender, will not be ranked by the WBA, IBF, or WBC. Had one of them by now simply ranked all fighters fairly, regardless of what belts they hold, they might already stand tall as the market leader and, thus, be the organisation that the best fighters would instinctively radiate towards. Furthermore, had promoters, broadcasters, and, frankly, the media at large, not been so willing to welcome new organisations and new titles every five minutes, and then market those organisations and titles like they mean something, the landscape might be considerably less cluttered. One wonders if now, while under attack, one sanctioning body will announce huge changes to their policies to prove they’re the people who can enforce overdue improvements.
Meanwhile, Zuffa, if they’re to fulfil White’s promises, need to show more than an ability to award titles. They must also exhibit a desire to dismiss drug cheats, a want to build the sport from the ground up, and, as a promotional powerhouse, and without exception, make fights that are worthy of championship status. In short, there’s still an awfully long way to go to achieve the dominance for which White openly yearns.
But let’s not make up our minds just yet. Rome wasn’t built in a day and boxing fans are nothing if not impatient. After all, we’ve spent decades watching this sport tie itself in knots. Whoever is brave enough to undertake the mountainous task of unpicking them has got to start somewhere.
