Outside Source
Dana White seems to be wavering on promoting Zuffa Boxing in the near future.
After helping to promote the blockbuster boxing match between Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor in 2017, the UFC president vowed that he was “getting into boxing, 100 percent.” In the months that followed White stood by those plans, even teasing an announcement for this coming October.
While White currently has bigger issues at hand in trying to stage a UFC pay-per-view during a global pandemic, he doesn’t sound optimistic when it comes to the overall state of the Sweet Science. That, in turn, has seemingly dampened his enthusiasm for his own boxing endeavor.
“I hate speaking negatively about the sport of boxing, other than the fact that it’s a mess – we all knows it’s a mess – and that it needs to be fixed, if it can be fixed,” White said in an interview with Yahoo Sports Kevin Iole. “I told you guys that I would have a press conference last October and announce all these things, but as I dove into this thing and started to look into the sport of boxing, the economics of boxing, that sport’s a mess. It’s a mess and it’s in big trouble. I don’t know. I don’t know if it can be fixed.”
White balked at the notion of having boxing matches under the UFC umbrella to potentially gain a larger audience for Zuffa boxing. A centrally-focused event with one discipline is a far more appealing prospect for the UFC boss.
“I believe that when you put on a UFC event or a boxing event, all the focus and attention should be on that one event. You start with the main event and then it trickles down into the card,” White said. “There are some great fights that are lined up like, if you don’t know now you know. There’s a couple of fights in there that people might not actually know about that you focus on. And the same thing for a boxing match. When you go to an event, any event, you have to be focused on what’s happening on that card and excited about it. . . You can’t mix and mash all those things together. It just doesn’t work, in my opinion.”
White added that the audience for both sports is entirely different. Those who attend a big-ticket boxing card like the Tyson Fury–Deontay Wilder rematch might not necessarily be interested in seeing Khabib Nurmagomedov and Tony Ferguson square off for UFC lightweight gold.
“You’re gonna bring out different groups of people for different events,” White said. “Like when we do pay-per-views, it’s not all the same buyers. For different fights, it’s different buyers. You have that general group, the hardcore fans that are gonna buy almost everything, and then different types of fights are gonna bring in different people.”
This article first appeared at Recent News on Sherdog.com
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