It felt significant because all the relevant pieces were there. All the sounds, the smells, the mise en scène. You had, for starters, Neil Diamond singing “Sweet Caroline”, the prologue to something big, and dancing to it were three scantily-clad women soon joined by a fourth who did cartwheels down the runway. You also had an MC, or hype man, who was off camera to begin with but could be heard shouting “People, let’s see some fingers up!” as two drummers accompanied the dancing girls and played Bhangra music. What followed was a loud “BRAAAP!” and our first glimpse of the boxer, dressed in a red robe, who had by now appeared alongside his hype man, holding a mic and wearing sunglasses indoors.
At last, they walked, all of them, and the fans cheered. Some reached out to touch the boxer as he strutted down the runway, while others just tried to capture the chaotic scene on phones lifted high above their heads. It built and it built, as any ringwalk should, and by the time the “Crown Prince” had reached the ring, the arena was fit to burst, with men and women wondering out loud, “What could possibly come next?”
Well, what came next was a fight. Not a championship fight, or even a competitive one, but a routine four-rounder.
This, you see, was the night of Yuvraj Karia’s ninth professional outing and, at 18 years of age, he was still very much learning, finding his feet. It was true that he had cracked the ringwalk, and presented himself like a world champion about to make the 10th defence of his title, but the reality was something else. The reality was that Yuvraj Karia’s pièce de résistance, or payoff, was a rather anticlimactic four-rounder against Jake Pollard, a journeyman who had won only one of 107 professional fights.
When BOXXER, the promoter of Friday’s event in Cardiff, posted a clip of Karia’s ringwalk to social media, they chose to caption it with “That’s how you make an entrance!” and described it as “electric”. However, few who watched the clip supported this sentiment. In fact, beneath the post commenters instead vented their fury: “Dude he’s fighting is 1-106. Boxing is a joke lmfao,” wrote one. “Ahh I’ve just fully cringed at this [three vomit face emojis],” wrote another. Then: “Bloody awful.” Then: “WTF is this shite.” Then: “Embarrassing.” And finally: “Just get the fighters in the ring to do what the crowd paid to come and watch.”
One couldn’t help but sympathise with BOXXER when reading those comments, for all they had wanted to do was give their fighter a platform on which to express himself and then use the clip of him expressing himself to attract eyeballs and go viral. The problem is, when you try to push style over substance in a sport like boxing, chances are you will soon be reminded of why it is necessary to include at least a smidgen of substance. You can’t, for example, expect to receive positive feedback when an 8-0 prospect cosplays as a world champion, regardless of how inventive or innocent the act happens to be. This, unfortunately, will only trigger fans who have grown accustomed to being duped by the machinations and gaslighting of promoters, and to a lesser extent boxers, throughout their time following the sport. Lie to them, fine, but at least pretend to be telling the truth. At least try to cover up the selling of shite as Shinola.
That said, don’t hate on the “Crown Prince”. Instead, hate the game. The Crown Prince, or pawn, is merely playing by the rules of the game – the fame game, the boxing game – and trying to be seen and heard at a time whenever everybody’s eyes and fingers are scrolling at a pace their brains cannot handle. If unwilling to play, how else can an 18-year-old super-bantamweight expect to capture the attention of the public in this day and age? How else can he expect to grab column inches or, better yet, go viral? Certainly, news of him beating a 34-year-old journeyman in a four-round fight he is meant to win won’t suffice. Even if he should dazzle, and even if he should look like Britain’s best prospect, you need more than that in 2026. Much more.
That’s why fighters like Karia, when offered the chance to express themselves, jump at it. It’s why BOXXER, in particular, are so keen to offer their fighters the platform to do it and run the risk of embarrassment in pursuit of going viral. We have seen this in the past with the ring entrances of Francesca Hennessy, whose father is a promoter and who loves to cut a few shapes on the runway before entering the ring. We also saw Gradus Kraus, a light-heavyweight from Holland, perform an endearing dance routine with his daughter before a fight in January, which got attention online despite the fact Kraus looked like a hostage forced to dance at gunpoint.
Neither Kraus nor Hennessy are world champions, of course. They are, in fact, still both on the rise, doing all they can to win fights and, more importantly, generate attention. It is in the name of that, attention, they look beyond the fight and think outside the box. It is for that reason they and many others consider themselves not only boxers but brands or performers, recognising that promoters and TV/streaming networks now prefer to invest in those things – brands and performers – rather than boxers.
Some will embrace the freedom to multi-task, and play other parts, yet there will be just as many who do it begrudgingly or see the performance side of fighting as a necessary evil at a time when the world’s stage has never been larger or more crowded. This, whether you box or not, is the fight we all fight in 2026. We use Neil Diamond to tell us times are good when we see no evidence of this, and we use platforms to inform the world of our significance long before we have done anything to prove it. Then we wait impatiently for the validation of strangers, only for these strangers to cut us back down to size. “Awful.” “Embarrassing.” “Shite.”
