We’re nearly at the halfway point of 2018, and Zuffa Boxing hasn’t really gotten off the ground yet. UFC president Dana White was briefly linked to heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua, and a fully fledged contract with the promoter-less Mikey Garcia, but nothing has materialized.
White ventured into boxing promotion last year with the Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Conor McGregor mega-fight, and as he told Mario Lopez on his ON With Mario show, he believes he can “do it better” than what’s currently in the sport.
“It’s so broken and so fragmented,” White said. (Via The Mac Life) It’s just, how do you do it? I’m still poking around figuring out how do I do this? How do I get into this and make it work. First of all if I sign a couple of guys, which I could do, I could go out and sign a couple of big stars — who they gonna fight? In my world, I have 550 fighters under contract, so I can make any fight I want to make. You have to have a deep roster to make great fights. So I wouldn’t have a deep roster right out the gates.
“I’m still poking around. You’re gonna see, coming up here soon I’m going to make a real ballsy move here pretty soon. We’ll see how it pans out.”
White is also critical of what he thinks is a case of boxers playing it safe in the ring once they become big superstars, unlike the UFC.
“I just think that when you get guys in boxing that become huge superstars, it’s almost like they don’t want to fight anymore,” he said. “Whether it’s not engaging in the ring, and trying to do just enough to win and just enough to not lose and you don’t see that in the UFC, man. When these guys come to fight, they come to fight. We stack the card, and I think we put on the best live event in all of sports.”
At a guess, that statement seems based almost entirely on his perception of Floyd Mayweather. I don’t think anyone could accuse a prime Manny Pacquiao, Juan Manuel Marquez, Miguel Cotto, Anthony Joshua, Canelo Alvarez, or Vasyl Lomachenko of having some documented history of doing the bare minimum to win.
White has already been combative with promoters Bob Arum of Top Rank, Golden Boy’s Oscar De La Hoya, Showtime Sports executive Stephen Espinoza, and recently accused Eddie Hearn of being “very oversensitive” when news of White wanting to work with Joshua came out. Beyond that, he revealed that Zuffa Boxing will have its own league and not work with any of boxing’s sanctioning bodies.