DAZN Sucks
And boxing is going in the wrong direction.
While watching TGCE (The Greatest Card Ever) the other day, one thought was constantly interrupting my viewing experience: DAZN is not good at the one thing it exists to do. How can a sports broadcasting service be this bad at broadcasting sports? Just under a year ago I wrote "all that money isn't translating into production values, a DAZN broadcast without technical hiccups is like a Bethesda game without bugs. It doesn't feel like they're even trying". Regrettably, this is still the case.
I cannot overstate just how bad DAZN is. You won't hear this from anyone professionally involved in boxing. Because just about anyone who is professionally involved in boxing is at these fights live and in-person, it means most of them never actually see how terrible their end-product is. Or maybe they do and they just can't see the problem? Someone may as well start a one-man crusade to make the problems harder to ignore.
And what better place to start than with TGCE? Take for example, simple tasks like running spelling/grammar checks on graphics.
It might come across as nitpicking. But think for a second, how often do you see these kinds of mistakes in other more popular and more successful sports? Or what about how consistently bad the audio mixing is on these shows?
Has there ever been a DAZN boxing broadcast where they haven't had multiple songs playing over each for minutes at a time? Once again, where else in sports broadcasting do you see such consistent incompetence? And in this audiovisual product, the visuals also suffer. If this card wasn't in Saudi Arabia I'd be wondering if their cameraman was afflicted by intemperance.
Much of this can be attributed to how cheaply they're trying to make this. If you ever look at the DAZN careers page, they are constantly hiring freelancers in the UK and outsourcing almost everything else to Hyderabad, India. I can't hold it against people on the other side of the world that everything is a bit crappy when a live transmission director is expected to be in charge of "The Monitoring and quality control of up to 10/30 live events at a time". The fault lies higher up, with whoever made that decision.
The biggest awful decisions are the scummy business practices which have made DAZN an easy target for ire. Once upon a time, DAZN announced itself to the world as the death of pay-per-view (PPV) boxing as we know it. It's a familiar story, 10 years ago Al Haymon's Premier Boxing Champions (PBC) attempted to give ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶w̶o̶r̶l̶d̶ the United States #FreeBoxing4All. PBC eventually went back to PPVs. DAZN began with generous introductory offers as low as a few dollars month and avoided PPV for years, until bringing Canelo to their service resulted in the first PPV for subscribers in the US/Canada. The rest of the world got to see Bivol outbox Canelo at no extra charge but later fights would cost more. So would later subscriptions.
The flexible monthly price rose dramatically, doubling like grains of rice on a chess board and now costing $30/£24/€40 per month. Even the flexibility became rigid. The monthly subscriptions, "which can be cancelled at any time", now come with an asterisk that any time actually means "*Minimum three-month term". DAZN's TrustPilot reviews are still cratering at 1.1 out of 5 stars, with thousands of customer complaints mentioning being charged for a subscription when only wanting to buy a one-time PPV, how frustratingly difficult it is to cancel a subscription, finding out they've been charged even after supposedly cancelling, and issues they've had streaming the content they've paid for. TrustPilot reviews from Germany, Belgium, Italy, and several other places do not make for better much reading. Even DAZN Bet is getting cooked. And it's not limited to TrustPilot either, as customers vow to never give another cent to DAZN on other websites like PissedConsumer and the Better Business Bureau.
But even if all the scumminess and the basics like graphics, audio, camerawork, and problems streaming the fights were to be resolved, DAZN is still putting out a bad product from a boxing perspective. Take a minute to listen how Todd "it's Christian" Grisham, Shawn Porter, and Sergio Mora commentated over Shakur Stevenson's walkout.
Not to constantly glaze HBO Boxing, but I don't remember them ever saying "dear paying viewer, this next fighter is boring and not entertaining". HBO would show mini-documentaries and career highlights (the kind you never see on DAZN) to let viewers reach their own opinions and conclusions about fighters. If DAZN is going to hire haters on the mic, they should hire entertaining ones like Harlem's Killa Cam and Murda Mase. I was critical of Showtime for being a hype machine but it's just common sense to hold off on negative critical analysis until a punch has been thrown. And DAZN was an even bigger hype machine than Showtime ever was as they spent almost nine hours insisting that every fight on the card was a "50/50 match-up".
This card included two local Saudi Arabian 6-rounders facing journeyman Americanos who had a combined record of 14-62-3 (if you're wondering, the local talent won). It also included Josh Padley, an unknown British fighter with a record of 15-0 (4 KOs), taking a fight on four days notice against one of the top lightweights in the world, after being stopped Padley was grateful that he'd be able to quit his dayjob as an electrician thanks to the money received. Another last-minute replacement was Martin Bakole, who took a fight against a former heavyweight titlist on two days notice, missed the weigh-in completely (later revealed to be over 300lbs), and was stopped after fewer than 6 minutes of boxing. That's almost half of the fights on this nine-fight card. I don't even think it was a bad card on balance. But calling this 'the greatest card ever' does not help boxing. It only suggests that boxing can and will never reach greater heights than this.
But back to the commentary real quick.
Everything from Todd Grisham's forced sportscaster voice to his lack of sports knowledge to his lack of personality annoys me. I could begrudgingly tolerate all of that though. But calling Chinese heavyweight contender Zhilei Zhang a 'chinaman'? This is where things become, for lack of a better term, problematic.
I've heard it expressed over the years that 'chinaman' is the least offensive slur. It's just a simple description of a man who happens to be from China, right? When you really think about it would be no different to calling Hamzah Sheeraz, a British-Pakistani middleweight who fought on the same card as Zhang, a 'paki'. Or calling a Jewish boxer a 'yid'. And why stop there? We could start referring to black boxers as 'negroes' again. There are many more and these terms all have a purpose. There are the standard, neutral, and normal terms, such as 'man' or 'person', and there are the terms for the other, who are defined by how they differ from the norm, how they are foreign to us. The least offensive slurs are still slurs.
Compare the modern attitudes of combat sports to Egan's Boxiana, written in the early 1800s:
Call me a woke SJW pinko or whatever but I think racism and bigotry are bad and wrong. And not pushing back against "harmless" examples is how these things continue unabated and inevitably escalate. Nobody was physically harmed by a box of bananas and watermelons being sent to Keyshawn Davis's hotel room (though Teofimo Lopez might've hurt his ribs from how much he was laughing). Just like nobody was physically harmed when Ryan Garcia went on various Twitter rants last year.
Don't worry though, I've been assured that Garcia is canceled which means he is guaranteed multimillion dollar paydays in the future. And Teofimo Lopez was being interviewed at Saturday's Riyadh Season fight. When some American idiot threw hot dogs at his muslim opponent at an e-celeb boxing press conference, they at least didn't give him another fight. Do people enjoy these antics? Does it spark joy? Is this what will 'Make Boxing Great Again'? Are ya winning, son? Because as much as I'm bored of bigotry, I'm bored of the never-ending discourse that le trolls continue to fuel. Writing about this is not as much fun as writing about boxing. The same is likely true when it comes to reading about it.
Combat sports, collectively, have a reputation now. Maybe this casual racial banter is a conscious attempt to capture the boorish UFC audience, since in the MMA-adjacent world of 'bros' there's hardly a shortage of controversies, race-related or otherwise. It has been financially successful after all, just last February the most popular podcaster in the world renewed his 9-figure deal with Spotify. And this alternative right-wing has been going from strength to strength as companies take a liberal approach towards illiberalism.
Do you remember that viral clip where someone asked popular e-celeb IShowSpeed "Are you not [a zionist]?" and he said "No"? When asked "Why not?" he responded with "Why would I be a zionist?", which is more than I was expecting from the young man. The person asking him was Emily Austin, an American-Israeli white supremacist who believes that "DEI is racist" and calls it "the alleged Nakba", which is no different to calling it "the alleged Shoah".
Set aside for a second the implication that Amnesty International, the International Criminal Court, and the International Court of Justice are dealing in buzzwords instead of truth; this is as deranged as saying that indigenous Native Americans suffered no ethnic cleansing because 'they started the war and lost'. If memory serves, it was the European diaspora who arrived to settle uninvited. I only bring this up because Emily Austin is a presenter for DAZN Boxing. At least Speed had the good sense to unfollow her when she called him "boy".
As easy as it would be to say nothing, it's still better to say something. The people pushing/running DAZN shouldn't be allowed to pretend that they're unaware of any problems. In April 2020 Pauli Malignaggi got 'REAL DEEP' in an interview, first giving his analysis that "the dominant species in boxing was probably the African-Americans in the '70s, '80s, '90s", followed by later saying "I don't believe there is racial oppression in 2020, in this century. I believe there has been, sure, but I don't believe there is any racial oppression today". This was only a few months after Ahmaud Arbery had been killed for jogging while black. And while events like the Central Park 'Karen incident' and murder of George Floyd aren't exactly rare, nobody could've expected the outcry that followed (including Malignaggi losing his Showtime gig after declining to apologise for his comments).
Perhaps if there's a mega-viral video of a Chinese man being killed by the police next month, Todd Grisham could be in some trouble. In a better world, it wouldn't have to come to that. Say what you will about Dana White and how he runs UFC, he fired Todd Grisham for less. As with my complaints about DAZN broadcasts, if they were run by more competent people they'd be proactively addressing problems. People who turn a blind eye to things should be reminded that they know better. Leonid Blavatnik, the owner of DAZN, was onstage when Jonathan Glazer made his emotional Academy Award acceptance speech for The Zone of Interest, a film he helped finance. Blavatnik also supported defunding "Nazi-breeding college campuses" such as Harvard University because they failed to crack down on free speech hard enough.
DAZN is not it. Maybe SURJ will help improve things? Personally, I expect DAZN will continue to be associated with a different four-letter word.