Zuffa Boxing 10 had a world title fight, a hometown hero, and a roaring 3Arena crowd in Dublin on Saturday. What it did not have was ring card girls, and Dana White offered a five-second explanation for why. \u201cThe UK won\u2019t use ring card girls unless you have ring card boys,\u201d White said on streamer Nina Drama\u2019s live broadcast from the event.<\/p>\n
Ring card boys were not in attendance either.<\/p>\n
Drama carried the card live on her Kick channel<\/a>, billing the stream as featuring White along with WWE\u2019s Becky Lynch and Finn Balor.<\/p>\n White\u2019s comment referenced the UK, though Dublin sits in the Republic of Ireland, a distinction the Irish tend to feel strongly about. Zuffa Boxing 10 was the promotion\u2019s first card in Ireland<\/a> and its second outside the United States, following June\u2019s event in Bournemouth, England. Both fell under the promotion\u2019s multi-year Sky Sports agreement covering the UK and Ireland, with Paramount+ carrying the cards in the United States and Canada.<\/p>\n The ring card boy is not a hypothetical creature. Ultra White Collar Boxing, which runs charity shows across Britain, announced in 2018 that it would \u201ccontinue to employ \u2018ring girls\u2019 (and boys where available) at all Ultra White Collar Boxing events,\u201d calling the practice \u201cpart of the tradition of boxing,\u201d as reported by Third Sector<\/a>. The phrase \u201cwhere available\u201d suggests the supply of willing ring boys was not overwhelming. Formula 1 ended its use of grid girls the same year.<\/p>\n Not everyone in combat sports mourns the category. Khabib Nurmagomedov banned ring girls from his Eagle Fighting Championship promotion, telling reporters, \u201cLook, I don\u2019t want to offend anyone: Ring girls are the most useless people in martial arts. What is their function? I have a question. You can show that it is the second round on the screen,\u201d in comments carried by Fox News<\/a> via MMA Junkie. White has publicly defended the tradition throughout his UFC tenure, which made Saturday\u2019s bare ring apron all the more notable.<\/p>\n The card itself delivered for the home crowd. Aaron McKenna (21-0, 10 KOs) won the vacant IBF middleweight title with a wide unanimous decision over Etinosa Oliha (22-1, 10 KOs), taking scores of 118-110, 117-111 and 116-112, and Callum Walsh (17-0, 11 KOs) climbed off the canvas after a first-round knockdown to defeat Tyler Denny (21-5-3, 1 KO) on the scorecards, as detailed in BoxingInsider\u2019s results coverage<\/a>. The rounds changed without ceremony.<\/p>\n Neither Zuffa Boxing nor the British Boxing Board of Control has published a formal policy on ring card presentation, and White did not specify which authority the requirement comes from. The promotion has said it plans at least five UK events per year under the Sky Sports deal, a figure White cited following Zuffa Boxing 07<\/a> in Bournemouth. Whether any of them feature ring card boys remains an open question.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Zuffa Boxing 10 had a world title fight, a hometown hero, and a roaring 3Arena crowd in Dublin…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":851803,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[447],"tags":[703,49,48,82],"class_list":["post-851802","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-boxing","tag-boxing","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/851802","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=851802"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/851802\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/851803"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=851802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=851802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=851802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}