The New York Yankees are known as the “Evil Empire” for a reason. They consistently have one of Major League Baseball’s highest payrolls, they play in the largest media market and thus get excessive national coverage and, back at the conclusion of the 20th century, they won four World Series in five years. So unless you were raised to be a Yankees fan, chances are the Yankees became the team you most loved to hate.
Naturally, then, when the Yanks made the World Series in 2024 for the first time in 15 years, most of the baseball-engaged public couldn’t wait to see the Empire strike out.
Except the team they were up against, the Los Angeles Dodgers, got there by out-Yankees-ing the Yankees. The Dodgers assembled a roster that felt unfairly stacked – and it had been aggressive spending, more so than sharp scouting or clever trades, that made it so. The team was coming off an offseason in which it locked down Shohei Ohtani with a 10-year, $700 million deal – a $70 million per-year average that actually exceeded one franchise’s entire 2024 payroll.
For the average baseball fan not from the Bronx, the opportunity to watch the Yankees lose on the grandest stage, to see their fans’ collective hearts ripped out, is the next-best thing to watching your favorite team win it all. A Yankees World Series defeat is something we delight in. We love to see it happen.
Just maybe not like this. Not against these other guys with their own Evil Empire vibes.
Which brings me to the current clash between boxing’s sanctioning groups and boxing’s new deep-pocketed power duo, Turki Alalshikh and Dana White.
I’m closing in on 30 years covering boxing. I’m at somewhere north of 25 years rooting for the alphabet bodies’ demise.
They’ve diluted the meaning of the word “champion,” they’ve made a mockery of the concept of ranking fighters on merit and they’ve done their part to push boxing further and further from the mainstream. I firmly believe that boxing would be a healthier, more popular sport if each weight class had one champion, easily identified by the general public, as once was the case. Alphabet title proliferation is not the predominant reason boxing has been pushed to the fringes, but it’s somewhere in the top three or four reasons, certainly.
So I’ve been waiting almost my whole professional career to see the alphabets shoved aside and soundly defeated.
Just maybe not like this. Not by these other guys with their own Evil Empire vibes.
It’s hard to know how to feel when the enemy of my enemy is also my enemy.
To be clear, my use of the word “enemy” is an exaggeration.
I have actually come to like WBC President Mauricio Sulaiman very much on a personal level, and the alphabets are not my “enemies” – they’re just a collection of largely self-serving businesses that I feel have damaged the sport.
I don’t know either White or Alalshikh personally. The former has never wronged me directly or, as far as I know, indirectly. The latter has denied my colleagues at BoxingScene access in a blatant and unjustified abuse of power, but I haven’t necessarily been directly impacted. They are men whose politics and worldviews don’t remotely align with mine, but it would be a stretch to call them my “enemies.”
But still, applying a looser definition of the word, the enemy of my enemy is also my enemy. The forces trying to take out the “bad guys” may be even worse guys.
I want the alphabets gone. But at least they’re the devil we know.
It’s tough to figure out who to root for here – beyond rooting for a Tarantino-style ending. (Another comment I don’t mean literally, in case that wasn’t obvious.)
Nearly a quarter-century ago, in December 2001, when I was the managing editor of The Ring magazine, my boss, then-Editor-in-Chief Nigel Collins, revived Ring championships. He had a pie-in-the-sky hope that this might rid the sport of the sanctioning bodies, but the belts’ more realistic purpose was to provide an alternative for fans and fighters, offering a system where the ratings made sense and whereby you could easily identify who the real champion was.
The timing felt right. After a couple of decades of the WBC, WBA and IBF muddying the title picture and making every so-called “world champ” a claimant to just one-third of a championship, now the WBO was gaining acceptance and reducing titleholders’ shares to just one-quarter of the pie, and the WBA was getting into the habit of handing out both a “super” and a “regular” title in many divisions (this practice began in December 2000).
To have five fighters in a single weight class declaring themselves king is equivalent to anarchy.
In conjunction with that, by the end of 2001, there was a mini-trend of star fighters unifying titles and clearing up their division’s title picture.
Lennox Lewis had unified three heavyweight belts plus the lineal title in 1999. (Then he lost the crown to Hasim Rahman in ’01, but regained it shortly before The Ring championship policy went into effect.) At light heavyweight, Roy Jones finished unifying the three belts The Ring recognized in ’99. In September ’01, Bernard Hopkins won the Middleweight World Championship Series and unified the three major three belts. And two months after that, Kostya Tszyu stopped Zab Judah to combine those same three belts at 140 lbs.
It was a starting point. It was an alternative to the alphabet madness.
But it needed buy-in from folks with louder megaphones than The Ring.
Max Kellerman and Brian Kenny jumped on board enthusiastically on ESPN. But the HBO brass wasn’t into it (even though some of the broadcasters told us privately they would be), and Showtime, which had an exclusive deal with Don King at the time, showed no interest in supporting the cause.
We had the best of intentions, but we only got so far – as evidenced by the fact that there are still at least four recognized alphabet straps in every division nearly 25 years later.
And the irony is not lost on me that Alalshikh now owns The Ring and can control its titles.
Last June, Zuffa Boxing was founded, with Sela – the Saudi Arabian “entertainment and hospitality” company – owning 60 percent of it, and TKO Group Holdings – the parent company of White’s UFC – holding a 40 percent stake.
And Zuffa is now adding its own belts to the mix. Whether Ring belts and Zuffa belts can or will coexist (or will perhaps merge) is unclear, but certainly Zuffa is aiming to run the alphabets off the road.
That’s not me speculating. In January, White spoke these words to Stephen A. Smith: “I'm gonna get rid of the sanctioning organizations.”
Zuffa Boxing is actively engaged in trying to amend the Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act of 2000, calling it the Muhammad Ali American Boxing Revival Act of 2026, or the Ali Revival Act for short.
The Ali Revival Act reentered the news cycle last week, when, on March 17, changes were quietly made to it. These were changes that were not voted on the way certain amendments had been in January. These were changes that, thanks to soft spots in the American legislative system, could be included in a final passed law without many members of the voting body even being aware of them.
There are numerous prongs to the Ali Revival Act, some potentially positive, some potentially problematic.
Before I delve into the sanctioning-body-related implications, a quick survey of some of the other aspects.
On the plus side, there will be guaranteed per-round minimums for the boxers – which aren’t a dramatic improvement over the current smallest purses, but every little bit counts.
And there will also be established drug-testing standards, which is theoretically a step forward, although these requirements favor those big-time promoters with endless budgets who can afford to pay for the testing and threaten to put the squeeze on smaller promotional companies and make some club shows impossible to stage.
Along similar lines, insurance costs for promoters could go up significantly, which again is no biggie for a company with Saudi funding but could be devastating to the little guy.
Perhaps the most glaring reason for fight fans to oppose the Ali Revival Act: It will eliminate the existing Ali Act’s requirement that promoters make certain financial disclosures to boxers and commissions. So if, say, a promoter is keeping 90 percent of a fighter’s purse, well, that may just remain the promoter’s dirty little secret.
On to the parts aimed at sanctioning bodies.
The Revival Act establishes grounds for a promotional company, under the categorization of a Unified Boxing Organization (UBO), to award its own titles and compile its own rankings – to be a sanctioning body, in essence.
The text of the bill specifies that “A sanctioning organization or Unified Boxing Organization shall award only 1 championship title for each weight class,” and that “A sanctioning organization or Unified Boxing Organization may not award an interim championship title except in the case of an injury or illness to a reigning titleholder, refusal or inability by the reigning title holder to defend his title, or for reasons beyond the control of the boxer, including inability to travel.”
These are totally sensible adjustments. Multiple belts from a single sanctioning body in a single division are an affront, and often the use of interim titles is too. So, bring it on. Let’s clamp down on that nonsense.
There is a perhaps unintended side effect, though: Regional titles, perfectly useful minor titles never purported to be “world” championships, could get caught in the crosshairs if the language isn’t clarified.
But much more troubling is who’s behind these sensible adjustments and how little reason they’ve given us to trust that they have the fighters’ or fans’ interests at heart.
As Thomas Hauser recently wrote in The Guardian, in some ways Zuffa’s contracts “make Don King’s contracts of old look fighter-friendly.”
As is widely acknowledged, the UFC business model is such that the company thrives while the athletes are routinely underpaid. There is every reason to think White is trying to transfer this paradigm over to boxing. Zuffa will control its championships and rankings while tying fighters’ purses to those championships and rankings it controls, an obvious conflict of interest.
Zuffa wants to take over boxing and enjoy the same sort of near-monopoly UFC has in mixed martial arts. And if boxing becomes a monopoly, fighters will have no leverage to negotiate, no protections or alternatives.
By all accounts, the die has been cast with the Ali Revival Act. The votes are lined up. The guy in the Oval Office who is not exactly pro-labor and who’s planning to host a UFC event on the White House lawn this summer surely isn’t about to bust out a veto.
Again, the Ali Revival Act isn’t all bad. Just as Saudi money in the sport hasn’t proven all bad (some great fights have been made that otherwise wouldn’t have had financing), and just as White’s presence in the sport won’t be all bad (he knows how to maximize a combat sport’s exposure).
White, Alalshikh and the Ali Revival Act are all marching hand in hand to rid the sport of the sanctioning bodies. And that, on paper, should be a welcome development.
Boxing has this long-standing infestation. The exterminators are here.
But what if the exterminators walking through the front door are just as bad as whatever’s living in the walls? What if instead of smoking out the vermin, they’re going to burn down the whole house and then sell the vacant lot?
I’ve been waiting half my life for this. One champ per division is the dream. And here come the guys with the money, power and connections required to potentially make the dream a reality.
Except there’s something so gross about the way they’re going about it that, somehow, to my amazement, a part of me is rooting for the alphabets to survive.
Just like I’d probably have to root for the Yankees this fall if they were the only thing standing between the damned Dodgers and a threepeat.
Eric Raskin is a veteran boxing journalist with nearly 30 years of experience covering the sport for such outlets as BoxingScene, ESPN, Grantland, Playboy, and The Ring (where he served as managing editor for seven years). He also co-hosted The HBO Boxing Podcast, Showtime Boxing with Raskin & Mulvaney, The Interim Champion Boxing Podcast with Raskin & Mulvaney, and Ring Theory. He has won three first-place writing awards from the BWAA, for his work with The Ring, Grantland, and HBO. Outside boxing, he is the senior editor of CasinoReports and the author of 2014’s The Moneymaker Effect. He can be reached on X, BlueSky, or LinkedIn, or via email at RaskinBoxing@yahoo.com.
