Jorge Masvidal, Nate Diaz prove UFC is out-punching boxing with Canelo made to wait
- Fight fans forced to wait for Masvidal-Diaz to finish for Alvarez-Kovalev WBO light heavyweight title bout to start
- Canelo Alvarez best paid star across all of sport but gimmick ‘BMF’ fight eclipses one of biggest boxing bouts this year
While the UFC’s New York medical professionals were disappointing fight fans with the decision to end the hotly anticipated “BMF” fight between Nate Diaz and Jorge Masvidal on Saturday night, boxing fans were made to wait.
DAZN USA, the broadcaster of the light heavyweight title fight between Saul “Canelo” Alvarez and Sergey Kovalev, decided to wait until the UFC 244 main event at Madison Square Garden was finished before the WBO title was put on the line.
As you might expect, this was a move that was free from criticism, especially as images of the fighters kicking their heels made their way on to the internet.
Canelo is pure box office. DAZN know this, that’s why they signed him to an 11-fight, five year, US$365 million contract – the biggest in sport.
But even knowing this, they decided to wait for the UFC to play out, with the fight not starting until after 1am Eastern Time.
The UFC 244 main event was for a belt that did not exist outside Nate Diaz’s head until he claimed the title for himself after his win at UFC 241
Nate Diaz says The Rock ‘picked wrong side’ with Masvidal
“We didn’t seriously start talking about this fight until a couple of weeks later in a matchmaking meeting,” UFC president Dana White said.
It was carried into the Octagon by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and the presence of the pro wrestler turned Hollywood superstar carrying the newly minted belt in New York served to highlight that this was a gimmick.
There are no two ways about that. The title of “baddest [expletive]” is undoubtedly cool but not one that sports and their governing bodies come up with themselves.
It was a throwback to Masvidal’s first public fights back on Kimbo Slice’s street fight videos. Then known as either “Ponytail” or “Cuban Jesus”, Masvidal showed his skills as a 19-year-old with fights in an alley behind a laundromat and the back garden of a Miami home.
That was 16 years ago and despite being pre-YouTube, people all over the world lapped it up, downloading the videos from file-sharing programmes like Napster and Limewire.
If anything that demand has grown and the UFC has grown alongside it. Boxing, on the other hand, is sort of a bizarro UFC.
While White and his chums clearly call the shots in the Octagon – to the point where they can put together a “BMF” belt and a fight to live up to it within a couple of weeks – there’s little more than confusion with the governance of boxing.
Canelo knocked out Sergey Kovalev to claim the WBO light heavyweight belt but there is also the WBA, IBF and WBC belts and that is not to mention The Ring’s lineal champions.
Is it unsurprising when there is not one single unified champion over the 17 weight divisions – from strawweight to heavyweight – that boxing is falling behind the lean, mean UFC machine?
There is the argument that DAZN merely waited to make sure that they got the biggest possible audience for the man they pay the most lucrative contract in any sport. They have a point but that does not deny that it is boxing that blinked when it went head to head with the UFC.
This is one of the biggest fights of the year but it waited for another fight that started off as something of a joke to conclude.
There are many boxing fans, the sport’s purists, who have no interest in UFC. They hated DAZN’s decision and some of them may have turned their backs on the broadcaster, if not boxing itself. They are already upset when the biggest fight in boxing in recent years was Floyd Mayweather Jnr against the UFC’s Conor McGregor, and when the next big fight in boxing is between YouTube stars KSI and Logan Paul next week.
Then there are the “fight fans” who love all that. They wanted to watch both events on Saturday night. The decision worked out for them, as it did for DAZN according to reports after the pay-per-view.
The Athletic’s Mike Coppinger claimed that to be the case on Twitter, writing that “it appears the move paid off”.
“Told DAZN subscription sign-ups and audience surged immediately following the end of Masvidal-Diaz,” he added.
As for the boxers, who knows what they thought of having to wait an extra 90 minutes to touch gloves. With reports they spent the wait napping, maybe something – or 365 million somethings in Canelo’s case – put them at ease.
DAZN and the other boxing promoters might want to avoid such clashes in the future to avoid further backlash from their core audience, or they might want to do it to ride the coattails of fight fans pumped up from the UFC.
What we saw on Saturday is that when it comes to being the BMF in the fight game, then UFC wins hands down.
