In The News

While I take an indefinite break from writing up title fights predictions and instead patiently wait to see if I'll receive a review copy of Aussoline's 'Undisputed: Usyk vs. Fury' book (🤞), I figured it'd be worth dropping a few cents on recent developments/news in the world of boxing. It'll be a lot easier than trying to come up with a coherent review for Rocky IV, an objectively terrible movie that I adore and uphold as a classic.

(!)BREAKING NEWS

The sun rises in the East. Life, death and taxes. Tyson Fury coming out of "retirement". Clearly upset by the worldwide attention that Anthony Joshua's victory over Jake Paul got, Fury will be looking to set social media ablaze with the next Netflix superfight. Paul vs. Tyson, Canelo vs. Crawford, Paul Presents: Taylor vs. Serrano III, Paul vs. Joshua, and... Fury vs. Makhmudov? Yes, in April 2026, Arslanbek Makhmudov will get the chance to put Fury out to pasture and raise his own Q Score. He almost certainly won't. But he might, and that's reason enough to believe it's worth watching.

What's harder to believe is Fury's claim that the world has been set alight by this news.

The "reach of over 6 billion people" he speaks about is impressive, but you should be naturally weary of big numbers on the internet by now. A view on TikTok is not calculated the same way as a view on YouTube or a view on Twitter or Instagram. Note how he's not even talking about views. Nor even the newer and hazier metric of 'impressions'. As clarified on Ring Magazine social media, the Fury-Makhmudov announcement had "6.7b potential impressions online and across social media". Given that the population of this planet is just north of 8 billion, this newest metric essentially means that everyone in the world that technically could have access to the internet potentially may have been reached and it doesn't matter one jot if they weren't.

I'm therefore proud to announced that PrizeFighting also has a reach of over 6 billion people. Top of the world, Ma! I'm forecasting no less than $100bn in Series A funding any day now.

O Derek Chisora

Journeyman and former contender Derek Chisora is set for a payday in what will be billed as his last ever fight (following his previous last ever fight, The Last Dance, against Otto Wallin in February 2025). He will be facing former WBC heavyweight champion Deontay Wilder, who many are writing off in this bout. Wilder, currently sporting a record of 2 wins and 4 losses (3 by KO) in his last 6 fights, has been touted as an opponent for Oleksandr Usyk by none other than Usyk himself. The record is suspect but I've seen Chisora get knocked out by worse boxers than Wilder. As for Usyk-Wilder, it's perhaps premature to start speculating but it must be said that Wilder had Fury down for 10 whole seconds (twice) while Usyk didn't even make him touch the canvas once.

Breaking non-news

Speaking of premature speculation; iVisitBoxing is run by the Welsh-Uruguayan executive & founder of iVisitMedia, Señor Ed Pereira. They recently generated worldwide headlines for plans to break the all-time boxing attendance record, which according to the Guinness Website of Records was 135,132 people watching middleweight champion Tony Zale in a non-title bout against Billy Pryor in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on August 16th, 1941 (refereed by Jack Dempsey).

I'm not sure how the exact number came about given that it was a free, unticketed event. Newspaper reports at the time only say that the police estimated 135,000 people were there (with tens of thousands being in town only for the Fraternal Order of Eagles convention). The earliest appearance of a precise figure - 135,132 - is in newspaper publicity for Nat Fleischer's 1941 Ring Record Book. Where did he get it from? Given that he's been dead for over 50 years, we can't ask him. But given how error-prone The Ring magazine has been in its long history, I'm willing to believe he just made it up.

So what then is the all-time boxing attendance record? The long-standing one prior to Zale-Pryor was Dempsey-Tunney, boxing's third million-dollar gate. Reportedly (according to Effingham Daily Record via the wire) there 118,736 tickets sold and 2021 seats comped, giving a total of 120,757 in attendance. Rickard, the Don King of his day, estimated there were 5,000 employees and policeman watching too but this is likely a gross exaggeration. Either way, we can estimate roughly 120,000 people were there.

Next up is Julio Cesar Chavez against Greg Haugen on February 20th, 1993 in Mexico City. A Don King promotion, the reported attendance figure for this bout is 132,247. Newspapers say that by February 12th there were 40,000 tickets sold and by February 19th, the day before the fight, "Promoters claimed they were nearing the 100,000 mark in ticket sales". I'm having a bit of trouble tracking down the primary source for the precise figure but let's assume that +130,000 is roughly right.

Which leads us back to iVisitBoxing and their goal to hold host over 135,000 at the Civic Center Plaza in San Francisco on July 11th, 2026. There's been open speculation and e-hypebuilding that iVisitBoxing were(/are?) close to getting Usyk-Wilder over the line for their record-breaking bout. It's all inside baseball because this is still only planned. Despite claiming to be partnered with YouTube, there was no official announcement on YouTube and no official statement from YouTube. The only complete footage of the sparsely-attended launch announcement was shared live by independent videographer FunTruck, the official upload came 5 days later and nearly a month later there are still no fighters announced.

Parent company iVisitMedia recently reported a modest windfall of £5m with Companies House and the magnitude of a free event with that budget remains to be seen. To make matters worse, their chosen date of July 11th means the event will be taking places the same day as the last two quarter-final games of the 2026 FIFA World Cup. How much of an appetite will people have to watch a boxing card after ~6 hours of soccer? Is there enough of a boxing audience in San Francisco for this event to function as counterprogramming?

Let's Get Ready To Retire

I wrote about ring announcers some time ago and some time has passed since then. Enough time for Michael Buffer to turn 81 years old and convince me that he should throw in the towel. He is now the same age as Joe Biden was during his disastrous 2024 debate. Even reduced to only appearing for the main event and reading out the scorecards, his announcing at the Stevenson-Lopez fight was more than just low energy and undignified, it was sad to see. Jimmy Lennon Jr., 67, has similiar problems with reading out names and statistics lately. In December he introduced Stephen Fulton (who was facing O'Shaquie Foster) as "Stephen Foster".

I'm not for a second suggesting that the problem is that they are old. I didn't have a problem with them when I wrote about them previously, when they were still old but more importantly weren't dropping the ball. But it's as I said, nothing lasts forever. Except for David Diamante saying "the fight starts now!" several minutes before the fight actually starts. It never fails to make me chuckle despairingly, it'd be like if Ben Edwards said "Lights out, away we go!" at the start of a F1 formation lap. Only he says it for years and gets paid handsomely to do it.

Seven Sayonaras

The Magnificent 7. Frank Warren's boxing show in Manchester was set to showcase seven boxers from the Queensberry Promotion stable to a domestic audience on January 24th, including the slowcooking heavyweight prospect Moses Itauma. However, a press release on January 13th told us that Itauma was injured. What manner of injury was it? That's classified. Oh well, at least there can still be a show for The Magnificent 6. Well, not quite. On account of Itauma, who turned professional over 3 years ago and has had a lowly 13 fights (facing only one journeyman/gatekeeper of note), the entire card was postponed to March 28th. And all of the undercard fighters will have lost another 2 months of their career.

To add insult to financial injury for every fan who had booked travel and hotels for the original date, the press release did not include an apology to paying ticketholders. They were told their options were to keep their ticket for the rescheduled show or receive a full refund. Surely it would've been easier to offer full refunds to those who would lose interest in an Itauma-less card and a token discount to the next Itauma fight for those who would've liked to have seen the remaining uninjured fighters? Arguably, the headliner knocking over another can was the least interesting bout on a card with well-matched contests.

Floyd 'Out of Money' Mayweather

Ex-titlist and current apartheid activist (FTR: pro, not anti) Floyd Mayweather has been making the news recently. You may recall rumblings last year that he was due to face the man, the myth, the legend - Iron Mike. Annie get your gun, Pretty Boy Floyd will instead be facing Greek kickboxer Iron Mike Zambidis in Athens this June.

Why doesn't Mayweather retire? To listen to him tell it, that's an unfair question because "nobody ever asks Warren Buffet or Bill Gates to retire". Bless his heart but someone should tell Mayweather that Buffet and Gates never got hit in the head for a living. And even then people were still calling for their retirement. 'Money' Mayweather cannot retire because he is bad with money. This is a man who was paid over a billion dollars at a time when the average stock market return was 10% a year and somehow never became a billionaire.

Two recent Business Insider articles highlight the extent of his self-inflicted financial woes but this outcome was obvious to anyone who has seen his proclivity for gambling and making it rain at stripclubs. Freck Billionaire (formerly signed to Mayweather's failed record label Philthy Rich Records) aired all this in a rap diss so violent that it got removed "removed for violating YouTube's Terms of Service". Philthy Rich Records, billed on various 2000s rap DVDs and 240p YouTube videos as "the future of music", never really got anywhere.

In fact, please stop and think about it. Is there any successful Mayweather business venture? This was a man who said TMT apparel would become bigger than Nike. I'm not saying it couldn't have done; I'm saying it didn't. Remember his NASCAR team, The Money Team Racing? The car ran as #50 after his 50-0 record, the 0 is presumably represented by the 0 poles and 0 wins accumulated. You can partially attribute these failures to James McNair AKA "P-Reala" AKA "The Harlem Hotboy" (another Philthy Rich Records labelmate). But the fish rots at the head. And Mayweather's head is devoid of introspection.

During his boxing career, he loved having it both ways. He endlessly reminded people "I'm my own boss", the only man in boxing unaccountable to anyone and able to chart his own destiny. And when it came to questions of tough opponents ducked or easy opponents cherrypicked, it was up to "my team, Al [Haymon] and Leonard [Ellebere]", all touchy questions were deflected and redirected to them (with one of them famous for not doing interviews).

A common Mayweather mantra is that he's surrounded himself with smart people, which is what smart people do. I don't disagree in principle but I don't think most of the people around him are very smart. If they were they would've gotten the most famous athlete in the world into the business of selling $10 supplements for $50 years before it became a cliché. No, what Mayweather has done is incredibly stupid, he's surrounded himself with people who are smart enough to take advantage of Floyd Mayweather, which isn't a high bar because Floyd Mayweather actively chooses to be an ignoramus.

So it comes to this: suing Stephen Espinoza and Showtime (owned by the regime-friendly Paramount) for over $340m because they didn't protect Mayweather from his own poor decision-making. A pdf of the suit is attached below. I addressed one of its main complaints before in a piece about Don King: "A boxing manager is supposed to act in a boxer's interest and ensure that the boxer gets as big a payday as possible, maximising the boxer's payday increases the amount that the manager will get their percentage cut from." Yes, managers and promoters in boxing can be duplicitious (and don't get me started on Harvard MBAs) but Mayweather - moreso than any other boxer in history - had enough money to ride off into the sunset. It's not Al Haymon's fault that Mayweather is a spendthrift. And now 50 back at it again, get the strap!

Tank stuck in the mud

Gervonta 'Tank' Davis was the self-declared face of boxing. Life comes at you fast and this past year has seen him go from being the future of American boxing to struggling massively in a controversial draw with Lamont Roach, to announcing a big money fight with one of the Pauls, then fumbling the bag because an ex-girlfriend filed a civil suit accusing him of the kinds of things he's been accused of in the past. Not satisfied with these depths, Davis violated probation for a previous 2020 hit-and-run incident and was arrested after "Miami Gardens Police Department and the United States Marshals fugitive task force conducted a three-county surveillance operation to find Davis". Is this getting rock bottom out of the way early in 2026 or will the once-promising superstar keep digging?

We Deserve It All

Read all about it! As announced at the Ring Awards gala, La Biblia del boxeo is finally available to peruse for free at The Ring Magazine website (login required). This would've been huge news had it happened 20 years ago when traditional media was finally warming up to the information superhighway, but better late than never. If you like history, magazines, sports, old-timey advertising, Americana, and boxing, this is a godsend to get lost in. It's a day I've been looking forward to since November 2024, when Turki Alalshikh shared that under new ownership they "intend to digitalize the entire archive".

You don't have to look far to see people exalting the totality of this project.

"Good news as the complete Ring Magazine archive has now been digitized and is available on their web site. Cool stuff!" - Adam Abramowitz, SN Boxing

"In early 2026, The Ring digitized, and published online, the contents of its entire catalogue – including every issue, Ring Record Book and Encyclopedia – in searchable PDF format." - Boxrec

"Access The Ring's complete digital archive and relive every headline, champion, and iconic moment from the sport." - Ring Magazine

"Last night also marked an important milestone with the launch of The Ring’s new digital app, expanded original content, and free access to the complete Ring Magazine archive — opening up decades of boxing history to fans around the world." - DAZN CEO Shay Segev, LinkedIn

After a sluggish launch in December 2023/January 2024 by the team behind WeBook.com, the website has now received a reboot courtesy of digital agency Huge. The updated website interface is fantastic. That said, magazine sites typically have bylines on the front page. How else am I supposed to avoid accidentally clicking a Hans Themistode article? But the real meat and potatoes is the archive itself, outsourced to The SDS Group. The ability to search by photo and create a galleries of old fighters or illustratitions and cartoons is a joy. As a bonus, unlike the previous version of the website where new magazines could only be viewed via a flippingbook.com embed, in the archive .pdf files can be viewed in-browser. Overall, it's a huge step in the right direction.

However! Though it pains me to say this, PrizeFighting is an iconoclastic website. It falls to me to speak up and regrettably look a gift horse in the mouth: this is an incomplete archive. Only just! Practically every issue of Ring Magazine is here. But not quite literally every issue. Only a handful are missing and using a checklist made by CyberBoxingZone's Mike DeLisa plus some of my own sleuthing, I've determined the following issues of Ring Magazine are yet to be available:

Mainline issues:

Vol. 8 #12 - January 1930

Vol. 10 #12 - January 1932

Side issues:

Ring TV Fights Annual 1954

Ring TV Fights Annual 1955

The Ring Extra Vol. 1 #1 - Mike Tyson Special

The Ring Extra Vol. 3 #2 Heavyweight Champions

The Ring Extra Vol. 3 #3 Boxing's Greatest Mysteries

The Ring Extra Vol. II #1 Mike Tyson Special

The Ring Special Issue Vol. 1 #1 The Heavyweight Champions

The Ring Special Issue Vol. 1 #2 Muhammad Ali Hall of Fame (1987)

The Ring Special Issue Vol. 2 #1 Muhammad Ali (1992)

The Ring Special Issue Vol. 2 #2 Famous Fights

The Ring Special Issue Vol. 2 #3 Dramatic Photos

The Ring Presents Vol. 2 #4 Super Stars, Super Rivalries, Super Brawls

The Ring Special Issue Vol. 3 #1 Boxing's Bloodiest Brawls

Boxing Superstars & Superfights: Holyfield vs. Lewis (Spring 1999)

Boxing Superstars & Superfights: De La Hoya/Hamed/Holyfield

Boxing Superstars & Superfights: Tyson/Tapia/Martin
[Cover N/A]

Boxing Superstars & Superfights: Lewis-Briggs
[Cover N/A]

Boxing Superstars & Superfights: De La Hoya

The Ring Presents: Boxing Almanac and Book of Facts

The Ring Yearbook 2005

The Ring Big Fight Color Special

Technically a magazine but primarily a fold-out poster. Still includes writing and analysis.

The Digital Only Issues(?)

After celebrating 100 years of The Ring in February 2022, by the end of that year the print edition ended up pining for the fjords and the brand would continue on RingTV.com as an online-only outfit. Thanks to the Wayback Machine, we know some of these were available as pdf downloads but I haven't been able to track them down. And throughout this period they still put out covers which I'll share here for posterity.

The Rocky Balboa Issue

Ok, you got me, this isn't a real issue. I just think it's neat!

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