Eddie Hearn – BOXINGWRITER.CO.UK

“I’ve been fucked so many times. I don’t even get upset about it. Boxing is one of the worst businesses in the world.” Eddie Hearn speaking to GQ in 2022.

Perhaps it says more about the writer than the protagonist that news of Conor Benn signing with Zuffa Boxing drew a wry smile. The schadenfreude of it all. Eddie Hearn, the sport’s most lusty chapman, with the film star crop and the double breasted roll neck and white pimp soles, betrayed by the fighter he stood by in his darkest moments.

And to Hearn’s newest nemesis. Dana White. A challenge even to boxing’s loquacious Lex Luthor – and if early interviews are a guide – the disbelief appeared to be winning.

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Peace: A period of cheating between two periods of fighting.
Ambrose Bierce, American Essayist, (1842-1914)

Boxing isn’t an entity. It isn’t sentient. It isn’t a building, a person or a particular group of people. Nor is it an organisation or corporation. It isn’t owned. It isn’t a charity. It isn’t a sanctioning body, or a certain array of promoters. It isn’t one thing, or a sum of many. It isn’t a game. It isn’t a business. It doesn’t think. It doesn’t care. It doesn’t have a conscience.

It isn’t even an it.

On days like today, when the shit hits the fan and someone has been caught with their hand in the till, or cheating to get ahead, the orgy of activity that occurs beneath the word boxing is often referred to in this way. As a thing. A conscious, aware, tangible, living, breathing thing. Boxing is not any of those ‘things’. And as such, the idea ‘boxing is hurting itself’ or, more dramatically, ‘shooting itself in the foot’, is a phrasing which hinders progress and the serious discussion required to find solutions to the problems all too frequently perpetrated in the name of the sport.

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