Ajagba’s right hand settled his business in the ring. White handled his outside it and ended the night by challenging boxing’s belt system.
Eddie Hearn had labeled Zuffa’s decision to stage Jai Opetaia vs. Brandon Glanton for a Zuffa cruiserweight title as “cringe,” questioning why anyone would dare wander outside the comforting arms of the alphabet committees and their sanctioning fees. White, unsurprisingly, did not reach for a softer tone.
“I saw Eddie Hearn saying that the belt is cringey and all that stuff,” White said. “I don’t think anybody looks at Eddie Hearn and says ‘oh this guy is a visionary’… The guy’s been in boxing forever.
“I look at him like most politicians; you’ve done nothing in the sport except stay in the lane, play by all the rules and ride right along… You ended up becoming part of the problem, is what happened.”
“I don’t wanna sit here and smash Eddie Hearn or anything, but Eddie Hearn works for his dad. I don’t think he’s come in and ever had any type of vision, whereas we do. We’re gonna change the entire sport.”
“The sport has been out there for over 100 years and there’s plenty of guys that are involved in the sport. There’s plenty 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 cause they don’t know how to compete. There’s no vision there.”
That was the warm-up.
White widened it to include Oscar De La Hoya and the sanctioning crowd.
“They don’t stop talking, the WBC and Eddie Hearn and all this sh** that Oscar De La Hoya talks,” White said. “We all know [De La Hoya is] fg mentally ill. The guy’s talking all this s**t and his place is in foreclosure, he’s suing his fighter to try to stay with him. Has he done a Clapback Thursday recently? I would fg love to see an episode of Clapback Thursday this Thursday from Oscar De La Hoya. Everybody feels it. It’s already happening. It’s going to be a fun year.”
The WBC caught one too.
“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’m not going to do business with them. I’m going to do my own thing.”
Then he zeroed in on Mauricio Sulaimán.
“We’re three fights in and people are asking all these questions and this Sulaimán guy is incredible,” White said. “He is incredible. He’s the greatest PR guy for how f*d up boxing is of all time. He’s incredible.”
“At the end of the day, you guys are supposed to be the experts about what’s going on,” White said. “Like I said, I’ll lay out a body of work this year and then you can judge me by how this thing plays out. Everybody knows that this thing has been broken for a long time.
Take the insults out of it and this is about who holds the pen. The alphabet outfits keep the rankings, call the mandatories, and stamp the belts once the checks clear. Promoters operate inside that system, lining their fighters up, 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 rankings on his paper, and the strap carrying his logo instead of three letters.
In boxing, a belt has value when a fighter has to earn it the hard way, through eliminators, against other prime heavyweights who can punch back. Remove that path and you are left with a nice photo and a new graphic package.
White has made it clear he would rather write his own rankings and call his own mandatories. The next year will show whether his heavyweights are grinding through real eliminator fights against prime punchers, or just trading leather inside a closed shop with a different logo on the belt.
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