Absolutely nobody in boxing had this on their bingo card. There were no whispers, rumours or cryptic social media hints.<\/p>\n
Usually when a fighter jumps ship, the outgoing promoter gets ahead of it with a statement or some kind of warning shot – not this time.<\/p>\n
White has made no secret of his desire to disrupt boxing’s power structure, and securing Benn – a fighter with genuine mainstream appeal, albeit still with doubters – is a statement signing.<\/p>\n
Hearn had stood firmly behind Benn throughout the doping saga and was actively manoeuvring him towards a world-title shot. Benn is the mandatory challenger for the winner of Mario Barrios v Ryan Garcia, and has made no secret of his ambition to become a world champion.<\/p>\n
So what does this mean for those plans? Zuffa recently signed reigning cruiserweight world champion Jai Opetaia, yet the long-term vision is one belt, a Zuffa title, and no reliance on the traditional sanctioning bodies. <\/p>\n
If that is the direction, what does Benn do now? Will he target becoming the first Zuffa welterweight champion?<\/p>\n
Over the past week, White dismissed Hearn’s credentials and quipped he works for his father Barry – prompting the younger Hearn to fire back that White’s boss is Alalshikh.<\/p>\n
From a pure PR standpoint, this is a major win for White. This brewing promotional rivalry just got a whole lot louder.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Absolutely nobody in boxing had this on their bingo card. There were no whispers, rumours or cryptic social…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":437294,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[2560,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-437293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-boxing","tag-boxing","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=437293"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437293\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/437294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=437293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=437293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=437293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}