-
Mike Coppinger
A meeting among promoters and boxing officials — including Top Rank CEO Bob Arum and WBC president Mauricio Sulaiman — was held Monday in Las Vegas, sources told ESPN, and one item discussed was how to deal with the expected arrival of the TKO boxing league led by Turki Alalshikh and Dana White.
The New York Times reported last month that TKO — the publicly traded company owned by Endeavor that comprises UFC and WWE — is planning to launch a boxing league later this year.
There’s been no formal announcement of such a boxing venture yet, but White, the UFC president, has hinted he will enter the boxing space many times over the past few months.
And over the weekend while White was in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, for the UFC event, Alalshikh posted a photo with White on social media and teased “big surprises that are massive, different and groundbreaking.”
Alalshikh, the chairman of Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority, was named ESPN’s most influential figure in combat sports in September.
He’s worked with all the leading promoters in boxing over the last 16 months to stage a slew of super fights ranging from a pair of Oleksandr Usyk-Tyson Fury bouts, two Dmitry Bivol-Artur Beterbiev fights (rematch on Feb. 22) and the planned September fight in Las Vegas between boxing’s top star, Canelo Alvarez, and Terence Crawford.
It’s unknown how the proposed league structure would work, but it’s possible it will be exclusive of any other promoters or sanctioning bodies as White looks to replicate the UFC setup that revolutionized MMA.