Turki AlalShikh brings Mecca of boxing closer to Mecca

In a press conference on the January 15, in the belly of a building somewhere in central London, ‘Knockout Chaos’ a heavyweight feature attraction, between former unified world champion Anthony Joshua and former UFC heavyweight champion Francis Ngannou was confirmed for March 8 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

This event will follow hot on the sandy heels of Tyson Fury meeting Oleksandr Usyk for the grail of undisputed heavyweight glory in the ‘Ring of Fire’ card which will take place on February 17 in the same city.  

These headliners are backed and stacked with title and non-title undercard fights featuring Joseph Parker v Zhilei Zhang, Nick Ball v Rey Vargas, Jai Opetaia v Mairis Briedis 2, Joe Cordina v Anthony Cacace and the return of Sergey Kovalev amongst the notables.

And all this follows the massive ‘Day of Reckoning’ event back on December 23, where Anthony Joshua gave Otto Wallin a hiding, Joseph Parker shocked Deontay Wilder, Dmitry Bivol toyed with Lyndon Arthur and Daniel Dubois shut up Jarrell Miller, in just the top four contests on that card.

Now, this isn’t usual is it? Match-ups like these may happen a couple of times a year, at best, after months of arguments over percentages, ring walk precedence, poster image rights and a mayhem of egos and don’t-knows spinning between the promotional organisations. That these fights are now happening with such regularity, and more incredibly that multiple promotional organisations, notably Queensbury and Matchroom, are working together, has changed the immediate boxing landscape in a big way.

So how has this happened? The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, that’s how. And for now at least, it is impossible to deny that the sport of boxing is as exciting as it has been for years, with the once unlikely destination of the Middle East becoming the boxing capital of the world de jour. 

Various reports estimate that since early 2021, Saudi Arabia has deployed some £4.9bn from its Public Investment Fund (PIF) in sports deals, which has had a global impact on professional golf, the football transfer market, stakes in Formula One and increasingly, boxing.                                               

The spiritual home of the sweet science has moved over the decades of course, usually in the direction of where the money is, and let’s be big boys about this, it has to. Because you only ‘get what you negotiate, not what you deserve’ in this sport – and that’s if you’re lucky.

Down in midtown Manhattan, on Seventh Avenue between 31^st and 33^rd Street, Madison Square Garden was once hallowed as the global ‘Mecca of Boxing’, hosting every notable from John L Sullivan to Muhammad Ali to Wladimir Klitschko, and retains residual respect and awe to this day for the pugilistic ghosts which haunt its rafters. The venue stood at the epicentre of a New York boxing scene between the late 1930s and mid-1960s, which defined the city as the fight capital of the world.

Radio and television recognised the mass interest in the sport and initially amplified its appeal. In 1944 Willie Pep’s defence of his featherweight title against Chalky Wright was the first sporting event to be broadcast on American television. And The Gillette Cavalcade of Sports radio broadcast aired out of The Garden from 1946 on Friday nights with immediate and long-running popularity.

However, it was this explosion of popularity and saturation that ultimately diluted and destroyed the boxing scene of New York, from the bucket o’ blood local club fights to The Garden via Yankee Stadium. The broadcasters who had sucked up the local club and live gate audiences with a focus on Friday night brawlers rather than purist technicians, began to latterly alienate their audience. Which, together with fight-fixing allegations and organised crime scandals saw a terminal bite taken out of boxing in the Big Apple

In an interview with Sports Illustrated in 1960, Jack Dempsey perhaps added a full stop to the end of the NY golden era, when he said, “I’m glad the Friday night fights are gone. Most of ’em weren’t any good anyway, and they were helping to kill the fight game. ... Now we should see the return of something like normal in boxing. Now fighters will have to be brought along slowly, on their merits, in small clubs. And people will begin going back to the boxing arenas in person. In the long run, this will help boxing very much.”

But big-time boxing needed a new home and it found one several thousand miles away out in the Nevada desert.

Las Vegas had hosted its first major fight in 1955 when Archie Moore took on Nino Valdez at heavyweight and its first championship fight in 1960, where Benny Peret won the welterweight title, defeating Don Jordan in the then-recently-opened Convention Centre.

Soon the casinos started hosting fights, offering extravagant site fees and the broad attraction of wine, women and song to back up the main events. Caesar’s Palace staged George Foreman’s clash with Ron Lyle in 1976 which proved a massive financial success for them and fights in their temporary outdoor arenas went on to feature Ali, Sugar Ray Leonard, Marvin Hagler, Julio Cesar Chavez, Oscar De La Hoya, Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield. 

Much of the boxing action on the strip moved to the MGM Grand and Mandalay Bay hotels during the 1990s and into the 2000s and latterly the cavernous T-Mobile Arena has featured some of the big guns in action.

New York, Las Vegas and at times UK stadiums, still host varying action but the investment that is being pumped into the sport by a Saudi Arabian administration with a number of societal, cultural and political objectives  - which are a debate for another day - have quickly revolutionised the immediate boxing scene. Because if the country had rivers, right now they would be flowing with the riyals that are flooding the sport and making once-impossible dream match-ups and the deepest undercards happen month after month.

Less cynically, H.E. Advisor Turki AlalShikh, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the General Entertainment Authority (GEA) and a driving force of the integral Riyadh Season of sport, food and entertainment, seems to be a genuine and knowledgeable boxing aficionado.

In an interview with Ade Oladipo for DAZN Boxing, AlalShikh reiterated his commitment to the sport and explained, “In the 70s and the beginning of the 80s, the sport number one in the world was boxing. Now, I am very sad, and the last result I have before we go inside it deeper, the boxing was the 14th. There is a lot of reason, some of it, there is not a lot of fighters as a charismatic and character now. There is a lot of problem of the promoter, they don’t want to do the strongest fight because it costs a lot. Some fighters don’t want to do the strongest fight. And there is four company, four belts. So many problems.”

So much for ‘so many problems’, because right now AlalShikh and his nation are continuing to solve them one by one, in the first quarter of 2024 alone.

From Fury and Usyk’s undisputed heavyweight showdown in February, through Anthony Joshua battling the enigma that might be Francis Ngannou in March, to Eddie Hearn’s Matchroom Boxing tooling up up against Frank Warren’s Queensbury Promotions in a ‘five-versus-five’ showcase likely in April, you have to ask with no small measure of anticipation, what next?