What The Hell America!

Saudi Arabia has thrown vast amounts of money into professional sports since the start of this decade. The new TKO Group boxing promotion, spearheaded by Turki Al-Sheikh, an advisor at the Saudi Royal Court and chairman of the country’s General Entertainment Authority, is one of the kingdom’s latest ventures.

The parent company of both the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) and World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), TKO Group will be putting on its first boxing promotion event this September. Founders Ari Emanuel and Vince McMahon’s long-term plan is to do away with boxing’s multi-promotion, multi-title model. Fans of mixed martial arts (MMA) will recognize this divide-and-conquer, anti-labor approach from the UFC, which has also consolidated an industry once made up by a plurality of legitimate fighting outfits.

Devotees of boxing have long decried what they see as the bureaucratic nightmare of a sport in which a variety of competing promotions make arranging fights between the best athletes difficult. From this perspective, Al-Sheikh’s attempt to consolidate the industry might look like a needed development for a sport long overdue for change. But to accomplish its vision, TKO taking aim at federal legislation designed to ensure fighter protections.

In contrast to MMA, where the UFC has around a 90 percent market share, boxing is a far less monopolistic sport. This deprives athletes of competitive leverage. The Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act, colloquially referred to as the Ali Act, was introduced in 2000, a period in which MMA was still a fringe enterprise and boxing was in dire need of reform. The act was an amendment to the Professional Boxing Safety Act of 1996, meant to protect athletes from promotional malfeasance within the sport.

Some of these issues included the prohibition of unfair contracts, dividing manager and promoter roles, requirements of financial transparency, granting audit power to the fighters, and the establishment of independent third-party sanctioning bodies to determine rankings and titles instead of the promoters themselves. It is this last set of safeguards that TKO is seeking to undermine.

These provisions are the reason that top-tier boxers end up bringing home purses orders of magnitude greater than their MMA counterparts. In the UFC, athletes’ share of the revenue split hovers at around 18 percent, while in boxing, the share of revenue that fighters enjoy can often be as high as 80 percent, excluding sponsorship deals, which are contractually forbidden to UFC fighters.

Floyd Mayweather Jr, a former boxing champ turned promoter, was famously paid $25 million by sponsors for the pair of trunks he donned in his bout with Conor McGregor, a UFC fighter who has been accused numerous times of domestic abuse and sexual violence. The gulf between the payment of MMA fighters and their boxing counterparts is largely responsible for athletes leaving the octagon for the ring.

Markwayne Mullin, a former MMA fighter himself and presently a Republican senator for the state of Oklahoma, sponsored an expansion of the Ali Act to mixed martial arts when he was a House representative in 2016, with the help of retired MMA legend Randy Couture. The UFC threatened to walk from the hearings upon being informed of the hall-of-famer’s inclusion.

Speaking in 2016, Couture remarked that the UFC did not want to give up its power, and that he “was fortunate to be in that top percent. I made a great living as a fighter. The mid- and lower-tier fighters, those guys that aren’t in the top 5 percent . . . they struggle.”

Thus far, it seems as though TKO Group’s priority is to scrap the part of the law that forces the promoter to relinquish belt-holding responsibilities to an independent third party — a provision that separates a fighter’s status in the sport from the promotion for which they compete. This allows the fighter leverage they would otherwise cede to the promoter, opening the door for promotional manipulation during negotiations.

There have been disturbing reports that the Association of Boxing Commissions (ABC) — the regulatory body ostensibly charged with protecting the interests of athletes — may be assisting TKO in this process.

It seems likely that these attempts to defeat labor within professional sports might be the beginning of a full-frontal assault on the industry’s athletes by the Trump administration. UFC president Dana White has long had a personal, professional, and political relationship with the president, which has included his making an appearance on the campaign trail, as well as giving a speech to Republicans on the eve of Doanld Trump’s inauguration. For his part, Trump has been the honored guest at several UFC events since taking office.

While there are plenty of legitimate criticisms that can be levied against boxing’s current model, the co-opting of regulatory watchdogs by promotional interests will do long-term harm to fighters. Luke Thomas, cohost of the show Morning Kombat and a strong critic of anti-labor practices in combat sports, has described the situation as a Chesterton’s Fence. By this, he means that, while admittedly imperfect, the Ali Act is essential to athlete welfare, and its erosion may carry unintended consequences for the sport writ large. Thomas sees TKO’s threat to boxing as “existential” and poses a simple yet clarifying question to the promotion’s defenders: “What does it say about a law’s ability to prevent monopoly if a monopoly from another industry [won’t] enter that space until they can get the rules helping to prevent monopoly overturned?”

The boxing world is about to find out.