UFC head honcho Dana White has once again resurrected his familiar pitch about getting into the boxing business.
In an interview with Sports Business Journal published on Saturday, the outspoken president of the popular mixed martial arts league, hinted that he has been at work for the past eight to nine months to launch a new boxing promotion within the next 12-24 months.
“I don’t know if I can fix the sport, but I think I can put on fights that people want to see and I can make boxing interesting again and build a brand around it,” White told SBJ.
White has long teased making an entry into a sport that is routinely criticized for its fundamentally decentralized business model and frustrating politics, to say nothing of the sport’s reliance on sanctioning bodies and their splintered championship belts.
White’s comment is a marked turnaround from 2020, when he suggested that he was finished trying to figure something out in boxing, telling The Sports Network that, “I’m not doing anything any time soon [in boxing]. …Never did I say that I was doing anything, but I’ve been looking and kicking the tires of boxing for the last couple of years. The reason you’ve never seen me do anything is because that’s how screwed up and broken it is. That’s what a mess it is.”
The 53-year-old White founded Zuffa Boxing, his boxing sidebar, in 2017, seemingly in response to the overwhelming box office success of the crossover boxing match between UFC’s Conor McGregor and Floyd Mayweather Jr. At the time, White insisted that he was “100 percent entering boxing.”
But in the ensuing years, White has mostly backed away from those enthusiastic claims. Indeed, it has been more common to hear White criticize boxing, usually in relation to fighter pay or certain fights not getting made.
Last weekend, White took another swipe at boxing when he was asked about protracted negotiations between WBC titlist Tyson Fury and WBO, WBA, IBF, IBO champion Oleksandr Usyk.
“It’s scheduled, no?” White said. “Oh, it’s not? Welcome to boxing, boys. Is it shocking? Yes. Is it ‘shocking’? No. It’s just that is boxing, that’s the way that that sport always seems to play out, the big fights that should happen never happen.”
If White gets into boxing, it will mark yet another significant non-UFC initiative for him. Recently, the promoter has drawn much attention (and ire) for his nascent Power Slap League.