News Bivol vs Eifert - Riyadh

randomg1t said:
it's hilarious to me that someone would suggest big fights started happening 2 years ago.

i honestly don't know how to respond to that. should i start listing every great fight made between 1900 and 2022 (or whenever the fuck he blessed us with his presence)?
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Nobody said we've never had big fights in the last 100 years. I'm saying boxing was at an all-time low when Turki got into boxing and now we've reached an all-time high. Last year is arguably the best year in boxing history with some of the best cards ever, yet you're always hating on the guy for the dumbest reasons.

"Oh, he's letting somebody else make Bivol vs Benavidez? He's a tyrant and a cunt." Seriously? After the guy just gave us Beterbiev vs Bivol twice?
 
StopDucking said:
Nobody said we've never had big fights in the last 100 years. I'm saying boxing was at an all-time low when Turki got into boxing and now we've reached an all-time high. Last year is arguably the best year in boxing history with some of the best cards ever, yet you're always hating on the guy for the dumbest reasons.

"Oh, he's letting somebody else make Bivol vs Benavidez? He's a tyrant and a cunt." Seriously? After the guy just gave us Beterbiev vs Bivol twice?
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you literally said we didn't have the best fighting the best before he showed up. and we absolutely did. this is a weird conversation to be having here.

and i hate on him for using boxing to sportswash his country's horrific human rights record, not for anything he's actually done in boxing. you must be confusing me with someone else.
 
randomg1t said:
you literally said we didn't have the best fighting the best before he showed up. and we absolutely did. this is a weird conversation to be having here.

and i hate on him for using boxing to sportswash his country's horrific human rights record, not for anything he's actually done in boxing. you must be confusing me with someone else.
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I'm saying boxing was in terrible shape at the time he showed up. Sure, if you go back to the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, boxing was in great shape, but when Turki came along in 2023, it wasn't. It was frustrating and had been frustrating for years. If Turki stopped writting checks, there's no reason to think fighters wouldn't go back to ducking one another.
 
randomg1t said:
it's hilarious to me that someone would suggest big fights started happening 2 years ago.

i honestly don't know how to respond to that. should i start listing every great fight made between 1900 and 2022 (or whenever the fuck he blessed us with his presence)?
Click to expand...

Nobody can prove the specific impact the Saudis have had because we can't establish the counter-factual. But it's silly to pretend that there weren't often problems in putting fights together in boxing or that Saudi money has been irrelevant in fixing some of them.

The clear, tangible impact of the Saudis is on the quality of undercards, which also relates to their impact on improving matchmaking.

We have seen guys accept fights with peer competitors in random undercard spots we would rarely see previously. These fights would instead have been their own main events with their own shitty undercards, and we would have seen these guys hanging around fighting random bums for longer.

There are certain historical failed matchups that I also just refuse to believe that Saudi money wouldn't have fixed.
 
ahead of beterbiev fight they mean?
 
Bivol needs to fight Benavidez...what the fuck is he even doing. Definitely one of the best LHWs ever but his resume is not too stacked.
 
HuskySamoan said:
Bivol needs to fight Benavidez...what the fuck is he even doing. Definitely one of the best LHWs ever but his resume is not too stacked.
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Bivol is coming off of back surgery and Eifert is apparently his mandatory. Benavidez is fighting Zurdo next. Meanwhile Beterbiev is available and called out Benavidez after the Yarde fight. We'll see if Benavidez even returns to LHW.
 
Iactus Inferus said:
Seeing some revisionist history going on. Ever since Floyd's career, the best fighting the best either didn't happen or happened too late. It was very common to hear from MMA fans that they preferred it because the best fought the best and more often. Same thing I heard from Kickboxing and Muay Thai fans. Now we have Turki getting the ball rolling on superfights, organizing main cards where many bouts would have previously been a main event prior to Saudi money being injected into the sport, and all of a sudden mega fights were consistently getting made just as often before? What? I get not liking how he conducts his business, but overall those big dollar signs have been helping popularize Boxing and create some great matchups
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we're talking about like the last few years. Yes, what you're saying is true TEN+ years ago. But not like 5 years ago.

Promoters and fighters started gearing toward unifying all the belts and creating undisputed champions during the 4 belt era in recent times, and this happened a couple of years before Turki got involved.

There had only been 2 undisputed champions in 2005. At the start of 2017, still 2. Now there are like 15 or so. Turki only started getting involved in boxing in like 2023.

So boxing had already been trending toward the best of the best fighting each other. For a reminder -

Undisputed championship (boxing) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

Majority of these do not involve Turki, and half of them happened before he got involved in boxing.

I know that undisputed does not necessarily mean the best fighting the best, but obviously a major competitive hurdle of the four belt era was the fact that champions were not unifying. Guys are still jumping weight classes to "avoid" fighting other top guys even during Turki's era, so that hasn't really changed.
 
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