Ajagba’s right hand took care of its business in the ring. White handled his outside and ended the night by challenging boxing’s belt system.
Eddie Hearn criticized Zuffa’s decision to make Jai Opetaia vs. branding Brandon Glanton for a Zuffa cruiserweight title as “shrinking”, questioning why anyone would dare to stray outside the comforting arms of the alphabet committees and their sanctioning fees. White unsurprisingly gravitated to a softer tone.
“I saw Eddie Hearn say that the belt is wobbly and all that stuff,” White said. “I don’t think anyone looks at Eddie Hearn and says ‘oh, this guy is a visionary’… The guy has been in boxing forever.
“I look at him like most politicians; you didn’t do anything in the sport except stay in the lane, play by all the rules and drive right by… You ended up becoming part of the problem, is what happened.”
“I don’t want to sit here and bash Eddie Hearn or anything, but Eddie Hearn works for his dad. I don’t think he came in and ever had any kind of vision, whereas we do. We’re going to change the whole sport.”
“The sport has been out there for over 100 years and there’s a lot of guys involved in the sport. There’s a lot of money in the sport. Eddie Hearn and his dad have a lot of money. It’s not like they can’t compete. They can’t compete because they don’t know how to compete. There’s no vision there.”
That was the warm-up.
White expanded this to include Oscar De La Hoya and the sanctioning crowd.
“They won’t stop talking, the WBC and Eddie Hearn and all this s*k that Oscar De La Hoya is talking,” White said. “We all know (De La Hoya is) fg mentally ill. The guy talks all this sh**t and his place is in foreclosure, he’s suing his fighter to try to stay with him. Did he do a Clapback Thursday recently? I would fg love to see an episode of Clapback Thursday this Thursday from Oscar De La Hoya. Everyone feels it’s going to happen. It’s already going to be a good year.”
The WBC also caught one.
“I said what I was going to do. I never said anything bad about the WBC or the IBF or any of them. I just said I wasn’t going to do business with them. I was going to do my own thing.”
Then he called in Mauricio Sulaimán.
“We’re three fights in and people are asking all these questions and this Sulaimán guy is amazing,” White said. “He’s amazing. He’s the best PR guy for how f*d up boxing is of all time. He’s amazing.”
“At the end of the day, you’re supposed to be the experts on what’s going on,” White said. “Like I said, I’ll put out a piece of work this year and then you can judge me by how this thing plays out. Everyone knows this thing has been broken for a long time.
Take the insults out of it and it’s about who holds the pen. The alphabet outfits keep the rankings, call the commitments and stamp the belts once the checks clear. Promoters work within that system, drafting their fighters, protecting positions and paying for the privilege of moving one spot at a time.
White is not interested in waiting for a call from a committee. He wants the board in his office, the ranking on his paper, and the band with his logo instead of three letters.
In boxing, a belt has value when a fighter has to earn it the hard way, through knockouts, against other prime heavyweights who can fight back. Remove that pad and you’re left with a nice picture and a new graphics package.
White made it clear that he would rather write his own rankings and name his own commitments. The next year will show if his heavyweights grind through actual eliminator fights against prime punchers, or just learn to trade in a closed shop with a different logo on the belt.
