Approach ‘World Boxing League’ with caution, says Joe Hughes

BN weekly columnist Joe Hughes calls for a ‘Tank’ step-up and warns that all that glitters in boxing is not necessarily gold.

There has been news this week of a potential takeover of the world’s biggest boxing promotional companies by representatives of Saudi Arabia. This could drastically change the sport, hopefully for the better. 

Creating a ‘World Boxing League’ has been spoken of before but never as realistically as it may be now. The multiple top-level promoters, all with their own individual contracts between themselves and boxers, managers, sponsors, TV companies, etc. make it very difficult to put one big fight together, especially when two boxers from rival promotional outfits are involved, let alone the number of fighters now spoken about being brought together. 

However, there has never been an interested party with anything even close to the kind of financial backing of Saudi representative Turki Alashikh. It’s a very real possibility that he could buy out all the other promotions, or at least the contracts of said promotions, giving him control of the careers of the biggest names in the sport.

Turki Al-Sheikh (Justin Setterfield/Getty Images)

It could open the door for some huge fights and increase the regularity of such events. It could also damage the sport in unforeseeable ways. Competition usually breeds success and having top-level boxing promotion become a proverbial one-horse race could have a detrimental effect after the initial excitement of the first wave of big fights coming together. We could be entering uncharted waters for boxing.

One of the biggest stars that could be lured by the Saudi money into taking the fights we want to see, competes this weekend. Gervonta Davis is undoubtedly one of the best lightweights in the world, maybe even one of the best fighters in the world, pound for pound. He has yet to prove it, however.

His career has been let down after let down in terms of the opponents he’s faced. This weekend, he faces Frank Martin in what should be a good fight but there are many other more attractive matches he could be involved in. Shakur Stevenson, Vasyl Lomachenko and William Zepeda are but a few of the matches at lightweight that would be better.

Previously, he seems to have been steered clear of Teofimo Lopez, Devin Haney and the aforementioned Lomachenko, just to name a few. He could perhaps be the best of the lot, as his biggest win, a one-sided beat down of Ryan Garcia, showed. But he needs to prove it in the ring by beating the best fighters in the world.