If you live in the United States, you can’t get away from the NFL. Media covers it like the White House 12 months a year. It’s on the internet. It’s on your television. It’s in your newspapers. It’s on the tongues of your friends and family members at the coffee shop, at work and at play.
It’s the biggest sport in the U.S. by far, but the league understands it simply cannot be satisfied with the status quo. It has to strive for more, try to make it bigger and better, keep highlighting stars and continuously tweak the rules. It’s how the sport continues to grow and evolve.
The owners compete vigorously on the field, but off of it, they have worked brilliantly together for decades to create this sports powerhouse that has made franchises worth billions.
It’s also the opposite of what boxing promoters do. They allow petty jealousies to get in the way of improving the sport. They take jabs at each other on social media and work together only when truly necessary. If it weren’t for the money being invested in the sport by Saudi Arabia, who knows what state it would be in today?
I know this: It’s not great now, though it would be a lot worse without the funding from the Saudis.
So as American Thanksgiving arrives on Thursday, how about a thanks and a tip of the cap to Turki Alalshikh, the chairman of the General Entertainment Authority in Saudi Arabia who has almost single-handedly kept boxing afloat the last couple of years?
The latest gem from Alalshikh is the Feb. 22 card planned for Riyadh that looks like a mega-card. BoxingScene’s Lance Pugmire reported Wednesday that the card will include a super welterweight bout between a pair of unbeaten KO artists, interim WBC champion Vergil Ortiz (22-0, 21 KOs) and IBF welterweight champion Jaron Ennis (33-0, 29 KOs).
If it was just a meh card, that would be enough to get the excitement going for the sport’s dwindling hard-core fan base. That, though, is hardly the only intriguing bout on the card. According to Pugmire, the card could look like this:
• Ortiz versus Ennis for Ortiz’s interim WBC super welterweight title.
• Artur Beterbiev (21-0, 20 KOs) versus Dmitry Bivol (23-1, 12 KOs) for Beterbiev’s undisputed light heavyweight championship.
• Daniel Dubois (22-2, 21 KOs) versus Joseph Parker (35-3, 23 KOs) for Dubois’ IBF heavyweight title.
• Carlos Adames (24-1, 18 KOs) versus Hamzah Sheeraz (21-0, 17 KOs) for Adames’ WBC middleweight title.
And potentially, it would include lightweights Shakur Stevenson versus Floyd Schofield, and heavyweights Agit Kabayel versus Zhilei Zhang, as well.
That, my friends, is a super card, and if it occurs, it’s worth the support of anyone who even remotely cares about boxing. Don’t steal the PPV; buy it to show you’re interested in this level of card.
