Zuffa Boxing 3 post fight press conference. <\/a>\u201cThis is like beating up babies. I feel like I came in and I\u2019m beating up babies. I expected more. I expected some pushback. I expected them to be more game.<\/p>\n\u201cThey\u2019re all way out of their league. Like absolutely, positively out of their league. I\u2019m actually a little shocked.\u201d<\/p>\n
While White says he\u2019s stayed focused on what he\u2019s building with Zuffa Boxing, there\u2019s undoubtedly been a lot of chatter from promoters like Hearn, who has taken public shots at him and the new promotion numerous times since officially launching in January.<\/p>\n
But talk is all that\u2019s really been happening and White believes it\u2019s just further proof that Zuffa Boxing is making everybody in the sport really nervous right now.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey don\u2019t stop talking, the WBC and Eddie Hearn and all this shit that [Oscar] De La Hoya talks,\u201d White said. \u201cWe all know [De La Hoya is] f*cking mentally ill. The guy\u2019s talking all this shit and his place is in foreclosure, he\u2019s suing his fighter to try to stay with him. Has he done a clapback Thursday recently? I would f*cking love to see an episode of clapback Thursday this Thursday from Oscar De La Hoya. Everybody feels it. It\u2019s already happening. It\u2019s going to be a fun year.\u201d<\/p>\n
White has often railed on the current state of boxing, which he has criticized as a sport that feels like a \u201cgoing out of business sale\u201d with every major event.<\/p>\n
That model may have produced a few massive cards or fights each year but nothing was ever truly planning for the future, which is what White says Zuffa Boxing is doing already.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt the end of the day, you guys are supposed to be the experts about what\u2019s going on,\u201d White said. \u201cLike I said, I\u2019ll lay out a body of work this year and then you can judge me by how this thing plays out. Everybody knows that this thing has been broken for a long time.<\/p>\n
\u201cI said what I was going to do. I never said anything bad about the WBC or the IBF or any of them. I just said I\u2019m not going to do business with them. I\u2019m going to do my own thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
White also fired back at Hearn\u2019s recent comments where he blasted Zuffa Boxing for introducing its own titles with the first major championship fight booked for March when Jai Opetaia battles Brandon Glanton for the cruiserweight title at Zuffa Boxing 4.<\/p>\n
\u201cI saw Eddie Hearn saying the belt is cringey and all this stuff,\u201d White said. \u201cI don\u2019t think anybody looks at Eddie Hearn and says \u2018oh this guy\u2019s a visionary.\u2019 The guy\u2019s been in boxing forever. I look at him like most politicians. You\u2019ve done nothing in the sport except stay in the lane and play by all the rules \u2014 you ended up becoming part of the problem is what happened.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t want to sit here and smash Eddie Hearn or anything, but Eddie Hearn works for his dad. He works for dad and I don\u2019t think he\u2019s come in and ever had any type of vision whereas we do and we\u2019re going to change the entire sport. I understand the people who are the status quo in boxing don\u2019t like it. But it doesn\u2019t mean they can\u2019t still do their thing. If your thing is as good as you think it is, and you are as good as you think you are, then do your thing. Good luck to you. I\u2019m going to do my thing and they\u2019re going to do theirs.\u201d<\/p>\n
White feels like veteran promoters such as Hearn had plenty of opportunities to carve out a space of their own in boxing but instead just fell back into the same old patterns that have defined the sport for decades.<\/p>\n
With Zuffa Boxing now in business, White sees Hearn and many others feeling the heat that the business is changing and they all may be shifting into survival mode. That includes WBC president [Mauricio] Sulaim\u00e1n, who has been in headlines recently for stripping champions of titles for not paying promotional dues and complaining that he wasn\u2019t treated properly when he attended the Terence Crawford-Canelo Alvarez fight this past September.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe sport has been out there for over 100 years,\u201d White said. \u201cThere\u2019s plenty of guys that are involved in the sport, there\u2019s plenty of money in the sport, Eddie Hearn and his dad have a lot of money. It\u2019s not like they can\u2019t compete. They can\u2019t compete because they don\u2019t know how to compete. There\u2019s no vision there. I don\u2019t know how else to explain it other than that.<\/p>\n
\u201cListen, I\u2019m sitting here my third fight in. I\u2019m either right or I\u2019m wrong. We\u2019ll find out. I keep saying it over and over again. At the end of the year, judge us by what we\u2019ve done this year. We\u2019re three fights in and people are asking all these questions and this Sulaim\u00e1n guy is incredible. He is incredible. He\u2019s the greatest PR guy for how f*cked up boxing is of all time. He\u2019s incredible.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Zuffa Boxing held its third event on Sunday in Las Vegas, and Dana White is shocked how quickly…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":471646,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[2568,64421,829,99],"class_list":["post-471645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-boxing","tag-boxing-news","tag-latest-news","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=471645"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471645\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/471646"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=471645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=471645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=471645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}