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Years ago, during one of Dana White’s frequent flirtations with boxing, White offered a reporter a tour of what he planned to turn into the boxing wing of UFC’s Las Vegas training center. Large, glass walled offices that sat empty would soon be occupied by seasoned boxing-types, White said. What White did for UFC, turning a financially failing mixed martial arts outfit into a company valued at $12 billion, he wanted to do for boxing.
Nothing came of it back then. White continued to plow forward with UFC, which later joined forces with WWE under one banner: TKO, which last week announced, in partnership with Saudi Arabia, the formation of a new boxing promotion, with White as the face of it. Inside a tiny Manhattan hotel room, White addressing the same reporter, was asked what has changed.
“Easy,” White said, pointing his thumb at a man seated to his left. “Him.”
Him is Turki Alalshikh. Alalshikh wears many hats: Royal advisor, chairman of Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority, owner of Ring Magazine, which Alalshikh purchased last November. Backed by Saudi’s billions, Alalshikh has quickly become boxing’s most powerful figure. He puts together deep cards, pays out huge purses and forces longtime rivals to work together.
Now, with White, Alalshikh wants to tear it all down.
Boxing, Alalshikh says, is “too broken.” The sport has no governing body. Too many belts. Cards are filled with mismatches. Boxers, once formidable figures in the U.S. sports landscape, are recognizable only inside the sport’s increasingly shrinking bubble. White, Alalshikh says, is his “bulldozer.”
Says Alalshikh, “He knows how to build models from scratch.”
It’s true. UFC was on the brink of bankruptcy when White and his partners purchased it in 2001. They had, in White’s words, “an old wooden octogen, three letters and a dozen fighters under contract.” Politicians referred to the sport as …
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