Back in my morphine days, one especially horrific moment stands out. I was paralyzed, but fully conscious, in room 309 of the Hotel Morelia Imperial in Morelia, Mexico with the TV blaring a Billy Mays OxiClean infomercial dubbed into Spanish.
“Di adios a las manchas! Limpieza profunda!”
I tried to squirm, tried to reach for the remote control. Sweat ran down my face and pooled at the back of my neck. But I couldn’t escape the hard-sell.
“Di adios a las manchas! Limpieza profunda!”
Panic. Anger. Morose resignation. Then, panic again.
I got a twinge of that same desperation while watching Zuffa Boxing 4 on Paramount+.
I had seen bits and pieces of previous Zuffa Boxing shows, so I kind of knew what to expect. But nothing could really prepare me for so much shameless, sloppy autofellatio.
I get that every show hypes things up a bit and does a good amount of “this is awesome” cheerleading, but this was something else. It was a little like making a grilled cheese sandwich on a hot plate and then doing a victory lap around the block with your soggy sandwich on a platter shouting, “THIS IS THE BEST GRILLED CHEESE. THE. BEST!”
It’s kind of hard to not roll one’s eyes and make jerk-off hand gestures when the broadcast crew is screaming about how tremendously awesome and revolutionary everything is as a sub-ProBox-level card plays out before your eyes.
Zuffa Boxing is the bastard offspring of the murderous Saudi Arabian monarchy and evil combat sports conglomerate TKO Group (parent company of UFC and WWE). The concept actually existed since 2017, but it didn’t take actual form until the corporate vultures at TKO found their ideal money mark, Turki Alalshikh.
“His Excellency” Alalshikh is the chairman of the Saudi General Entertainment Authority and childhood video game buddy of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. He also served as a strong-arm enforcer in bin Salman’s 2017 royal Saudi coup.
Type your email… Subscribe The media tools used to sell the Saudi/TKO/Zuffa effort– and I emphasize “tools” – are motored by a cuckified legion of writers and media people who are very happy to have a job and very eager to keep that job. Many of these people have found their way on to Zuffa Boxing telecasts. The end result is a mind-grating machine spewing head-scratching calls of things that kind of aren’t happening and/or not as “all that” as being pushed.
The formerly innocuous ESPN play-by-play guy Joe Tessitore barks hyperbole like he’s being cattle-prodded in the asshole whenever his salesman energy dips. Color man Max Kellerman, meanwhile, bends reality with his desperate push to make all thing Zuffa the bestest and most awesomest, like on previous shows when he compared Callum Walsh to Roy Jones or had some second-tier pug jabbing like Larry Holmes. Expert analyst Andre Ward, meanwhile, just kind of exudes sad “I just wanted to do color commentary…but I kinda want to leave now” energy.
Kellerman, who had been between gigs for a bit (unless you want to count his role in Sharknado 3), is now fulfilling his destiny as a privileged rich kid eventually morphing into a middle-aged corporate shill clinging to relevance.
Airman Joseph, before becoming Zuffa’s Seaman-swallowing Kellerman “Kids, you know how when you hear people in my generation tell you about the good ol’ days? THESE are the good ol’ days,” Kellerman huckstered as an introduction to a bout pitting Boxrec’s no. 1 cruiserweight Jai Opetaia against Boxrec’s no. 19 cruiserweight Brandon Glanton for the initial “Zuffa World Cruiserweight Championship” belt.
No. 1 vs. no. 19.
Not even the Turki Alalshikh-owned Ring Magazine rankings could find an excuse to rank Glanton higher than no. 10.
But, who’s keeping track? Zuffa isn’t even legally allowed to declare “real” world champions, but they did so on the assumption that their TKO Group political connections will soon get the Ali Act amended to smithereens (A House of Representatives vote is pending).
And then there’s Dana White– the wife-slapping walking ball sack and inveterate gambler with a heart of copper who hyped the UFC into prominence and now serves as errand boy to TKO corporate ownership. White’s been put in charge of the Zuffa Boxing product and can’t stop talking about how easily he’s kicking all of boxing’s ass with these low-rent shows.
“I’m making a world title fight!” “I was expecting a lot more from boxing, period, than what I’ve seen,” White told media at the Zuffa Boxing 4 post-card presser. “Everybody is a bunch of rinky-dink, it’s the most rinky-dink thing that I’ve ever seen in my life. I don’t know why I expected more from any of these people.”
Take White’s words to heart. If anyone knows rinky-dink, it’s a guy staging club-level shows in a warehouse down the road from Best Buy.
There’s no denying, though, that the boxing establishment has been weak when it comes to offering competition. But this is mostly because the sport’s promoters were taken in by Saudi payoffs and then blindsided by behind-the-scenes maneuverings to lure away their fighters and squeeze them from TV broadcast deals. (More on this entire behind-the-scenes boxing coup attempt in a Thursday premium piece).
The dark reality behind the Zuffa Boxing launch, however, is that, if they succeed in having the Ali Act amended and in getting the UFC-style monopoly they’re angling for, things will get bad for boxers.
The new world order, post-Ali Act nerfing, will kill off protections against coercive contracts and essentially cap fighter revenue and freedom. Zuffa would utilize a similar business model to the UFC, which has the company keeping as much as 85% of event revenue and hoarding almost all the power over a fighter’s career. With Saudi money and TKO Group political and corporate leverage working to push competition out of business, there’s a distinct possibility that they may work themselves into a monopoly-style situation. That’s certainly their goal.
Zuffa, though, will be facing an uphill battle in their “conquer the world” campaign. Boxing fans are buried in history and lineages. It’ll be exceedingly hard to get them to trash all of the past for something dubious in the present, wrapped up in a drab belt that looks more like bondage gear than a world title. And when it comes to the fighters, the truly passionate ones tend to be the ones focused on marking their place in boxing history and owning those belts that were held by previous generations of fighters.
Where’s the ball gag? When Jai Opetaia cruised to his unanimous decision win over Brandon Glanton to win the Zuffa belt, he made it clear how much the other belts meant to him. In the post-fight interview, as Kellerman continued insisting that he now WAS the undisputed cruiserweight champ, Opetaia twice shot down the notion, declaring, forcefully, that his goal was to snatch up all the other belts and become undisputed.
The Saudi/TKO/Zuffa axis will have to breed this affinity for history and tradition out of the fighters. If not, every title fight of theirs may run into the same buzzkill sanctioning body complications that gunked up the lead-in to Opetaia-Glanton.
But, the thing is, even if Zuffa fails in turning boxing into a UFC-style league and a corporate money-making machine, they’ll still likely damage the sport irrevocably, running established boxing people from the business and turning off a significant amount of the base in the process. A niche sport will become sub-niche, with many of those with the experience to rebuild pushed into other lines of work.
In the meantime, Max Kellerman is proclaiming that resistance is futile. It’s best for fans and boxing establishment to just sit back and enjoy the pillaging and plundering.
“What they haven’t understood is, the game is already over,” Kellerman recently smugged on his ‘Game Over’ podcast. “They just don’t know it. Game over.”
