The opening bell rang at 12:54 a.m. on the East Coast. And by the time it did, I wasn’t just tired. I was tired of boxing.
No matter how much you love a sport, there is such a thing as too much of it. And the American debut of Riyadh Season, even if made up of individual parts that were all appealing on paper, was simply too much boxing.
The pay-per-view portion of the card at BMO Stadium in Los Angeles consisted of six fights and, in the end, 60 of a possible 68 rounds. That’s 180 minutes of in-ring action, which is a lot for one night, even when managed properly. But when padded across nearly eight hours of telecast, needlessly extended in the late stages of an already long night by shameless kowtowing to a non-fighter whose defining positive characteristic is willingness to spend money, by a trio of national anthems including one representative of zero boxers on the pay-per-view segment of the card, and by a rap concert that basically answered the question, “How would you feel if the Super Bowl halftime show started with five minutes to go in the fourth quarter?”, it is a test of endurance and patience that reeks of not caring one bit about the paying customers or what convinced them to spend their money in the first place.
The Eminem interlude I can forgive, to an extent, in that it was considered a selling point of the show, he is a legitimate mega-star within his genre, and it surely added, for some, to the entertainment value of the evening.
But an interview with promoter Turki Alalshikh in which he displayed the charisma of a turnbuckle pad, the camera following him around as he arrived at ringside as if he was some sort of celebrity, an award presentation to Alalshikh in recognition solely of the fact that his boxing promotion is well-funded, who knows how many minutes’ worth of the words “his excellency” being inserted into the proceedings, a fan in attendance winning a new car because the Saudi government apparently has money burning holes in its pockets, the playing of the Saudi national anthem before a main event featuring no athletes from Saudi Arabia, and, randomly enough, an interview nobody asked for with Piers Morgan — none of this had one ounce of appeal to a single (non car winning) person who bought a ticket or shelled out for the PPV.
Alalshikh is not the first boxing promoter to insert himself into the show and forget that the fighters are the real stars. Don King used to do it all the time, for example, and he was much more long-winded than Alalshikh. But at least King’s lengthy rambles referencing Winston Churchill and Marcus Aurelius and Frederick Douglass came either at the tail end of the broadcast or at the press conference after the fights were over. They did not extend the suffering, unless you were a member of the working media waiting anxiously for a few quotes from Felix Trinidad.
I apologize if this whole column, to this point, reads like an old man shaking his fist at the clouds, with his middle finger extended. But you simply can’t ask people to wait through nearly seven hours of a broadcast for the main event to begin, all the while gaslighting them about this being “the greatest card ever assembled in boxing history.”
It was a deep card, yes. One of the deepest in boxing history. But the actual “greatest card in boxing history” surely had at least one A-plus, must-see fight somewhere on it. Quantity alone does not equal greatness. And in this case, quantity actually detracted from the overall experience.
Four years ago, WWE arrived at the conclusion that 5½ hours of WrestleMania at once is simply too much and started splitting the event across two nights. Riyadh Season needs to hurry up and reach the same conclusion about boxing. Instead of six pay-per-view-quality fights on a single show, this could have been two separate events — maybe a week apart, maybe a month apart — each with three PPV-quality fights and perhaps a hot prospect in a six-rounder thrown in as a change-of-pace bout.
And I realize the downside for fans: Now you’re asking them to pony up for two PPVs. Well, that’s easily solved. Put one on PPV — the one with the card’s one true PPV-headliner-level star, Terence Crawford — and air the other “free” on DAZN. Same cost to boxing fans. Same ultimate number of quality contests. Presented in a digestible format without asking people to commit eight hours of their Saturday.
When you string together six fights, all at the world-class level, one after another, they start to blend into one amorphous blob of jabs and hooks. By the time one Cruz (Isaac) was in the ring, I had pretty much forgotten all about another Cruz (Andy) fighting some six hours earlier.
The promoters and matchmakers need to develop a better understanding of pacing and what appeals to fans. You need a mix of styles and levels. You don’t want multiple 12-round chess matches on the same card, and you may not even want three Fight-of-the-Year-level slugfests on the same card, making you numb to the violence.
I know this is easy to suggest in hindsight, knowing how the fights turned out, but imagine if Saturday’s pay-per-view had consisted of:
- Crawford defeating Ismail Madrimov in a high-class 12-round boxing match that gradually built in drama and action after a slow start
- Jose Valenzuela scoring a hard-fought upset of “Pitbull” Cruz in a highly consequential 140-pound bout
- Andy Cruz battling through a few challenging spots to stop Antonio Moran in the seventh round
- A solid women’s fight with two-minute rounds as an amuse-bouche between the first and third contests
And a few weeks later on DAZN, Riyadh Season could have presented a tripleheader consisting of:
- Heavyweights Andy Ruiz and Jarrell “Big Baby” Miller fighting to a sloppy 12-round draw
- Heavyweight Martin Bakole registering a shocking KO of Jared “Big Baby” Anderson in a delightful five-round firefight
- David Morrell limping to victory in his light heavyweight debut against Radivoje “Hot Rod” Kalajdzic
The first one would have been a highly satisfying, well-paced PPV, and you could even have squeezed in your Eminem mini-concert without pissing fight fans off too much, as long as the card started at 8 p.m. ET and you cut out 90% of the Turki-centric elements. The second one would generate buzz with all the heavyweight contenders in action and the theme of going big on Big Babies, and would get on and off the air in a tidy three hours.
Separated, that’s a sensible lunch and a hearty dinner. But when you slop it all onto one show, now it’s the Thanksgiving meal, with the cranberry sauce bleeding into the stuffing and everybody overeating and you inevitably needing a nap after all the Turki. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)
Seriously, the weaknesses of this card compound when they’re all layered on top of each other. Isaac Cruz, Morrell, and Ruiz all produced disappointing performances. That much flatness in a single evening begins to define a fight card. Same with questionable scorecards. If you thought Morrell-Kalajdzic was close, Miller clearly beat Ruiz, and Madrimov did enough to top Crawford, you’re left questioning your commitment to boxing by the end. I didn’t think any of the decisions were outrageous — of the three, I was most offended by the lack of credit Kalajdzic received — but social media and the chat box on PPV.com featured a lot of amateur scorekeepers disgusted by the outcomes.
I’m not sure how sustainable the Riyadh Season business model is. Actually, that’s not true. I know exactly how sustainable it is. It’s not a business model, period. It’s a loss leader. It works for as long as the Saudi government is content to overpay and lose money in exchange for a reputational overhaul. And for all the money thrown around to make this card happen, well, it wasn’t a bad show, but it was like paying for a meal at The Bear and your big bucks getting you a few takeout sandwiches from The Beef.
On a related note, it seems to me that if and when someone comes along to actually save boxing, they won’t spend so much time congratulating themselves on saving boxing.
I went into Saturday expecting to find a fight/fighter-focused angle for my post-fight column. But thanks to my frustrations with the overall package, here I am, some 1,400 words in, having barely talked about any of the actual boxing.
That’s a shame. In an alternate universe, I could have written a column with one of these angles:
- “Bud” Crawford probably surrendered his case for the pound-for-pound No. 1 spot by struggling so substantially with Madrimov. And yes, it was just one performance, but when you fight only once a year, your last performance counts for a lot.
- Was this exactly what Crawford needed to convince Saul “Canelo” Alvarez to fight him? Alvarez-Crawford is somewhat less marketable now, but, hey, Oscar De La Hoya stunk against Felix Sturm and it didn’t kill interest in Oscar vs. Bernard Hopkins.
- Anything about the feel-good story of Valenzuela.
- Can Pitbull Cruz prove to be one of those fighters, like Arturo Gatti, who doesn’t need to keep winning to stay enormously popular?
- The many awards Andy Cruz deserves for the evening, including Best Andy (over Ruiz), Best Cruz (over Pitbull), and Best Cuban (over Morrell). OK, this would have been a weak and perhaps brief column. But I like to think I could have pulled it off.
- Big Baby Anderson handled his knockout defeat with total class and Big Baby Miller handled the controversial scoring of his fight the same way, and thus their nicknames proved somewhat ironic.
- Anderson had his Daniel Dubois vs. Joe Joyce moment, but Dubois is now one of the hottest heavyweights going, so let’s not write Anderson off — unless he writes himself off, which, as a guy who’s repeatedly expressed a lack of love for boxing, could well happen.
- This was another testament to the Top Rank matchmaking plan, as they maneuvered Anderson carefully to this point, and then Alalshikh dangled enough money to make him take a leap up in opponent quality, and everyone got what Turki paid for. (Or maybe this was an argument, from the fans’ perspective, against cautious matchmaking.)
- Bakole vs. Michael Hunter II: a must-make rematch so Bakole can aim for revenge, or a waste of Bakole’s sudden marketability? (At the very least, I know I’d take Hunter-Bakole II over Miller-Ruiz II.)
- Who was the big winner of Morrell-Kalajdzic? David Benavidez, whose light heavyweight outing against Oleksandr Gvozdyk doesn’t seem so disappointing now.
- Why do boxing judges hate Hot Rod so much? I had him losing 115-113 here (the judges scored 118-110 and 117-111 twice), and I remember all too well, as NBC’s unofficial scorer that day, when he got flat robbed against Marcus Browne half a boxing lifetime ago.
- Lightweight was already the best division in boxing — Gervonta “Tank” Davis, Shakur Stevenson, William Zepeda, Vasiliy Lomachenko, and Keyshawn Davis, among others. And here’s Andy Cruz, making it even better.
Well, I’m not writing any of those columns. I’m grumpily shaking double birds at the clouds while sleep-deprived because a “supercard” that was supposed to be a generous gift to boxing fans was a sycophancy-soaked slog. It had highlights, to be sure. It had one thrilling heavyweight fight, one pound-for-pounder tested, two upsets, and not a single one-sided mismatch. But when it was 12:15 a.m. and I was listening to Eminem rapping over a sample of possibly the Steve Miller Band’s worst song, wondering how much longer I’d have to wait before the music would end and the main event ringwalks could begin, it was hard to remember any of those highlights.
I love boxing. I suspect I always will. But my love has limits. And these marathon Riyadh Season cards are testing them in multiple ways.
Eric Raskin is a veteran boxing journalist with more than 25 years of experience covering the sport for such outlets as BoxingScene, ESPN, Grantland, Playboy, Ringside Seat, and The Ring (where he served as managing editor for seven years). He also co-hosted The HBO Boxing Podcast, Showtime Boxing with Raskin & Mulvaney, The Interim Champion Boxing Podcast with Raskin & Mulvaney, and Ring Theory. He has won three first-place writing awards from the BWAA, for his work with The Ring, Grantland, and HBO. Outside boxing, he is the senior editor of CasinoReports and the author of 2014’s The Moneymaker Effect. He can be reached on X or LinkedIn, or via email at [email protected].
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