Criticism in boxing is seldom ever constructive and is often unsolicited. Like the punch they fail to see, it tends to arrive when a boxer could do without it and comes not from coaches, or people whose views they respect, but from men and women whose names and faces they will never know.
It is for that reason the skin of a professional fighter today must be thick. It must be thicker than the skins of their predecessors and it must be thick enough to protect them from more than just punches. After all, no longer is it so easy for a boxer to perform badly, go home, and expect to read only a negative fight report in their local newspaper or the trade magazine. Gone, too, is the opportunity for a fighter to move on to the next fight as quickly as possible and eradicate memories of the last one. Instead, fighters of today must contend with large spells of inactivity, during which they can only stew, as well as a barrage of online abuse should they ever make the fatal error of searching their own name. Either you fight it, and trust your skin, or you ignore it completely – run away, find perspective, log off, touch grass.
For better or worse, today’s world is a playground for the loud and opinionated, with no room for either insight or logic. This we have now come to accept and all anyone can do, by way of survival, is roll with the punches and hope their skin holds up. Along the way, they will discover what grabs attention and they will realize that what matters to most “critics” is having their existence validated online. As a result, the world is built to accommodate this desire. It’s why social media has become so integral to selling anything, even ourselves, and it’s why comment sections and mailbags are indulged only to entice low-hanging engagement.
For a boxer, all this does is increase the pressure and brighten the light above them. Now, for many of them, there is no escaping its heat. Now even when they perform well, and are proud, there will be someone, somewhere who didn’t like what they did, their face, or the cut of their jib, and feels no way about letting them know. It pays, you see, to be different and no opinion grabs attention quite like that of the contrarian.
Online, you’ll find loads, all of them easy to ignore. Yet there are others, too, which, for a boxer, might be harder to ignore. On any fight-night broadcast, for example, there will be pundits and commentators paid for their views on a fight and these views a boxer will inevitably hear when watching their fight back. There is also a growing trend of promoters telling the world their every thought, with the sport’s most powerful man, Turki Alalshikh, taking this approach further and telling the world what he wants, usually via social media. As well as what he wants, Alalshikh has been just as vocal about what he doesn’t want, even going so far as to tell a boxer – something he has never been – how to fight in the ring.
This, on the face of it, is merely an extension of what we see every day in the comment section – that is, unqualified people telling qualified people how to do their job – yet it seems all the more jarring when a Saudi financier is calling for fighters to do more fighting. “No more Tom and Jerry fights,” Alalshikh said in response to the criticism two of his events received in May. “We can no longer support these kinds of fights with Riyadh Season and The Ring.”
What triggered that hard-line stance was the reaction to several dull fights one weekend (Saul “Canelo” Alvarez vs. William Scull, Devin Haney vs. Jose Ramirez, and Teofimo Lopez vs. Arnold Barboza), the sting of which was felt more by Alalshikh, it seemed, than the fighters involved. Why that is, one can only speculate, but perhaps the fighters have managed to toughen their skin in ways Alalshikh, new to the game, has not. Perhaps the fighters know that criticism comes with the territory and that what makes boxing so interesting and divisive is its array of styles and flavors, some of which taste better than others.
But that’s the thing: Alalshikh, for all his power and money, is still learning and looking through a narrow, subjective lens. When, for instance, he jokes that Shakur Stevenson, the WBC lightweight champion, should be made to fight in a ring which shrinks in size round by round, he is thinking only of what is good for him, the “promoter”, and not Stevenson, the fighter whose first thought is defense, self-preservation. Similarly, when Alashikh takes to social media to denigrate the efforts of Jack Catterall and Harlem Eubank, as he did last weekend, he fails to recognize that sometimes two styles are just not compatible and that action in the ring is not always guaranteed. These are fights, remember. Fights between human beings. Nothing about them will ever be orderly, never mind perfect.
Still, such is his power, it comes as no surprise that a lot of what Alalshikh has said regarding this matter has resonated. Even if some fans have criticized him for telling professionals how to do their job, there have been others who have thanked him for saying out loud what they have all been thinking. Because if it ultimately leads to more entertaining fights, and more risks being taken by boxers, what is the problem with speaking out?
The fighters, too, have made note of their master’s request. Some have replied to Alalshikh on social media and genuflected at his feet, telling him, “I don’t do Tom and Jerry fights. Please give me a chance, Your Excellency.” While others, like Shakur Stevenson, have made a mental note of Alalshikh’s complaints, swallowed their pride, and adjusted their style accordingly. Of this we saw evidence on Saturday, when Stevenson hung around a little longer in the pocket and took a few more risks in the company of Mexico’s William Zepeda. The ring didn’t shrink, and nor did he go all Arturo Gatti on us, but it was clear nonetheless that Stevenson was adhering to his master’s orders and thinking about the future.
As it turned out, Stevenson received more praise for that Zepeda win than any of his previous wins, despite losing some of the early rounds. Better yet, because he demonstrated that he can entertain and put himself in harm’s way, there is now a far greater hunger to watch him fight and a greater incentive, on Alalshikh’s part, to arrange big fights for him. After Saturday, Alalshikh wrote to the world: “Very happy Shakur delivered a great fight. Shakur gave the fans what they wanted to see and he’s now more respected than ever. And respect to Zepeda. He has a bright future and proved he’s a dangerous fighter.”
It could be argued that Stevenson’s approach to the fight was to some extent aided by Zepeda’s and that all he needed was an aggressive Mexican to spark him into life. But that is probably too simplistic a view. More likely is it that Stevenson felt under pressure going into Saturday’s fight and acknowledged the importance of doing more than just winning. If before that was his modus operandi – win at all costs – he knows now that to thrive in the sport today requires something extra. In other words, pleasing the fans is one thing, but pleasing Turki Alalshikh is another thing entirely. His criticism isn’t just constructive; it is critical to a boxer’s future. In fact, it is not even criticism. It is an order. Ignore it at your peril.
Get his approval, mind you, and you can relax. You can even look forward to the future. That’s what super-middleweight Hamzah Sheeraz will be doing this week, one imagines, following a fifth-round stoppage of Edgar Berlanga on Saturday’s “Ring III” card. He will be waiting for the next call from Alalshikh, or simply the next gushing tweet.
“What a performance from Hamzah Sheeraz in NY with thousands against him,” Alalshikh wrote after Sheeraz’s latest win. “England and Pakistan should be proud of Hamzah. He will be champion inshallah.
“Hamzah now deserves Canelo in 2026.”
Come Monday and Alalshikh was still very much in love. To show it, he took to social media again, this time to write, “Hamzah Sheeraz is proving to be another tall, lanky puncher. That was a spectacular KO in NY. You know who had a similar build? Tommy Hearns. Can Sheeraz build toward greatness too? Not comparing them, but let’s see.”
Of course, if there’s one thing we know about Turki Alalshikh it’s that he has his favorites and that these favorites are seemingly always treated well. He collects them like Pokémon cards, or Infinity Stones, and in Sheeraz he may have found a new, shiny one; a fighter after his own heart. Stylistically, there is no question about it: Sheeraz fits the bill. He is aggressive, powerful, looks for the knockout, and hates Tom and Jerry. But he is also a Muslim, like Alalshikh, and presumably a fighter with the potential to be marketed in the Middle East and fight there on a regular basis. A fight with Alvarez, for example, could very well take place in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia next year, if Alalshikh gets his way.
If so, what a difference five months make. After all, it was only in February that Sheeraz challenged for the WBC middleweight title and appeared to have been outboxed by Carlos Adames, the champion, over 12 rounds. And yet, to Adames’ dismay, all three judges that night saw the fight differently: one judge scored the fight to Sheeraz (115-114), one judge thought Adames walked it (118-100), and the other scored it a draw (114-114). Quite the spread, all this disagreement meant in the end was that Adames retained his belt via a split draw and Sheeraz left Riyadh with his unbeaten record still intact.
At the time it was considered a narrow escape; a premature step up in class which so nearly backfired. But maybe now, like the fight itself, it will be seen differently. Maybe Sheeraz learned more from that experience with Adames, a superb technical boxer, than he learned from his previous 21 fights combined. Maybe he needed that setback and the criticism that followed to make certain changes – including a new training team and a move up in weight – and to grow as both a fighter and a man.
In the shape of Berlanga, he had the ideal opponent on Saturday in New York. Unlike Adames, Berlanga is a fighter who has been telling the world how great he is without having proven it, and this allowed Sheeraz to keep a low profile and let the brash Puerto Rican do all the selling and pressure-cooking on his behalf. It also meant that when Sheeraz eventually stopped him, which he did so impressively, the result and performance would be more shocking to some – chiefly, those who believed Berlanga’s talk – than to others.
All in all, Sheeraz couldn’t have asked for a better opponent or performance following his rough time with Adames. “I promise you, whoever was in the ring with me today, there was no stopping me,” he said on Saturday night. “The amount of abuse I got after the last fight made me a hungrier fighter.”
Now he will start to notice how the pendulum swings back the other way. He will notice that just as he was written off as “another British hype job” for struggling to land much on Adames in February, he is now all of a sudden the next Thomas Hearns and a very real threat to Saul “Canelo” Alvarez. That’s just how it works, you see. Snap judgments only. Keep your considered views to yourself.
Luckily, having already sampled the fickleness of fans, Sheeraz will know to treat both positive and negative reviews with equal indifference. He will also know that only two opinions really matter: one, that of his coach, Andy Lee, and two, that of the sheikh at ringside, the one who prefers his cartoons AI-generated and, ideally, his judges, analysts and fights the same way.
