As I begin to write this, I honestly have no idea if this is a swan song farewell to boxing or a call to arms.
To be honest, covering boxing has become a tedious chore. Specifically, I’m referring to everything around the actual fighting.
I’m headed into my eighteenth year writing about this sport-- the eleventh where writing has been my full-time occupation. It’s been tough and I’ve had to make some life sacrifices to keep writing as my full-time job. More importantly, my family has had to make some sacrifices because honest men with a strong moral compass don’t go far in this business and don’t make what the shadier scribes make. It hasn’t been fair to my family, but they understand the importance of a purpose driven life and I love them for that. Success without meaning is absolutely useless. It matters that they understand that not everything is about grabbing at dollar bills. Pride, dignity, and self-respect matter, no matter how ridiculous that sounds in the context of the boxing business.
Boxing’s recent deep dive into subservience to Saudi Arabia has opened my eyes to the reality of this sport. Although always dirty to an extent and filled with con men, hustlers, and the inveterately short-sighted and greedy, boxing is probably beyond redemption if it can embrace a murderous monarchy and abuser of human rights and kiss the ring of a legitimately vile and dangerous human being placed as the figurehead for the Saudi boxing take over.
How stupid is the fight to save the soul of a sport when you realize there really is no soul to save?
I’m especially disgusted by the boxing’s media compliance and gleeful embrace of a regime that has ordered the gruesome murder of fellow journalists.
Sorry, I try to make things somewhat light-hearted in this column and take shots at my targets with arrows dipped in humor and sarcasm, but I have nothing funny to say about any of this at the moment.
The purchase and propagandist repurposing of Ring Magazine-- this sport’s closest thing to a historical journalism log-- has been especially nauseating, although not all that surprising considering who owned the company and who’s their leadership.
“I want to tell His Excellency that me and my team, my staff, we are honor-bound to help you realize your vision,” Ring Magazine Editor-in-Chief Dougie Fischer told the world during the Riyadh gala party to officially relaunch The Ring site and the resurrected print magazine.
Just when you thought Fischer’s instinctual boot-licking and lapdog compliance couldn’t get any more personally degrading, he found a way to top himself. He managed to make Radio Rahim look like Bob Woodward.
Over the years, I’ve been petitioned by some media people regarding certain political stances in boxing. They would argue their case, explaining that whatever stance they wanted me to take was the moral, conscientious thing to do in the face of evil deeds bigger than boxing. Now, some of those same people are taking Saudi money.
So, clearly, evil deeds don’t matter a goddamn bit if the evil-doers toss some lose change your way, right?
I’m sure the young man serving a 19-year prison sentence for a Tweet making fun of Turki Alalshikh...The unjustly executed...The women kept in perpetual subservience...Those caught up in the Saudis’ modern slave trade...etc...will understand the moral/ethical nuance in taking a paycheck to help the Saudis succeed in concealing their crimes amid their effort to become the Las Vegas of the Middle East. The media’s work in that regard makes them complicit in everything outside the Saudi facade.
And to think, I was plagued by an inner moral crisis when I was writing nuts-and-bolts fight previews for PBC. I thought I might’ve been selling out or compromising myself because of that gig, despite being assured that I was under no obligation to give PBC any free pass on anything I wrote here or anywhere else-- and despite NOT giving them that free pass. Some of the same shit-heads who now take blood money via Ring Magazine chided me for “getting that bag” and being “Haymon’s Hemingway” for that harmless work I did, Now, these people toss Turki salads and “get that bag” in service to the monarchy and, apparently, see no bleeding irony in their hypocrisy.
It's almost as if all these people who post about how much they love the sport, don’t really care all that much about it or where it’s being taken. Keep that in mind the next time one of these cucks posts a weepy tribute video about some legendary fighter.
In boxing, Turki sure found the perfect sport full of lackeys, lapdogs, and worse who will say, with a smile, “It's only boxing” and treat the sport like the neighborhood whore while, all the while, proclaiming their love for it and its athletes.
Turki’s perfect sport is also full of greedy nitwits easily guided into putting themselves out of business.
Even if you are a raging sociopath and don’t care one bit about morality or ethics, the Saudi takeover should trouble you. If you’re an “adult in the room,” you should be able to see above the Saudis grooming us with a handful of good fights and into where all this may be headed-- the total self-destruction of pushing the sport into a monopoly run by a murderous monarchy. A murderous monarchy, by the way, out of any jurisdiction and with full control of everything from fighter contracts to promotion to venue acquisition to sanctioning/regulation and, now, extended through the media covering their efforts.
This has been maddening. It’s like being on the Titanic and watching it sink as everyone around you tries to make the argument that the iceberg hitting the hull was a good thing.
So, am I in or out?
Honestly, I still don’t know. I’ll get back to y’all on that.
What I do know, though, is that with power now concentrated in Saudi Arabian hands, getting at the truth of any issue will be an impossibility. Monopolies under no oversight and with no accountability tend not to be very forthcoming. They also tend not to be all that friendly to labor, to the consumer, or to rabble-rousing nonconformists questioning their rule, like me. Ask the family of Saudi-murdered dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi about that last one.
Got something for Magno? Send it here: paulmagno@theboxingtribune.com