On Friday evening, I was texting with a friend when I happened to mention where I was: sitting in the middle of Times Square, watching a boxing match. He wrote back immediately: “What is the boxing match about? Like what is its significance?” This was a good question, although not one that could be answered in the minute-long break between rounds, and possibly not one that could be answered at all.
In a sense, the perversity of the idea was the point: find the busiest, most crowded place in America and then shut down enough of it to erect a boxing ring, as a way of proclaiming to the world that the sport still matters. Eddie Hearn, a second-generation boxing promoter, from England, was one of the people behind the event. A day before, standing in the ring as construction workers bustled around him, Hearn told me that, initially, he had been skeptical of the enterprise. “Up to about two or three weeks ago, I was still thinking, Surely, like, at some point, it’s just not gonna happen,” he said. Many fans didn’t quite believe it until the week of the fight, when the ring materialized on a patch of sidewalk north of Forty-third Street and east of Seventh Avenue, a few feet from the military-recruiting station. “Now I’m standing here thinking, The numbers are gonna be really big tomorrow—like, the global exposure of what is happening is getting bigger,” Hearn said. The former champion Oscar De La Hoya was also promoting the event, although he had conceded on Thursday that he wasn’t quite sure how it would work. “About the walk-out, I have no clue,” he said—there were no nearby locker rooms from which the fighters could dramatically emerge. “They might come out of the Starbucks Coffee, here.”
Boxing promoters tend to be at least as competitive as the fighters themselves: Hearn firmly told me that he was the lead promoter of the event, and so did De La Hoya. But both agreed that the true boss was Turki Alalshikh, the head of Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority, who has lately become the most powerful person in boxing; he seems to have a virtually unlimited budget, and a determination to turn his kingdom into the fight capital of the world. When Saudi Arabia made a similarly bold investment in golf, the result was a backlash so intense that it created something like a civil war within the sport. But the boxing world is rarely accused of excessive scrupulosity. One of the most storied events in the sport’s history might be the Rumble in the Jungle, from 1974, during which Muhammad Ali and George Foreman battled in Zaire, for the entertainment of about sixty thousand spectators—and for the glorification of the country’s autocratic ruler, Mobutu Sese Seko. The next year came the Thrilla in Manila, Ali vs. Joe Frazier in the Philippines, hosted by President Ferdinand Marcos, who had declared martial law a few years before. Fights tend to go to whoever is willing to pay for them; these days, that’s usually Alalshikh. “This is a freak occurrence in our sport,” Hearn told me, before the event. He was referring to Saudi Arabia’s investment in boxing, which has been lucrative but also somewhat destabilizing; for as long as it lasts, fighters will be happy to show up whenever and wherever Alalshikh wants them, without asking too many questions.
The headliner on Friday was Ryan Garcia, a lanky heartthrob from Victorville, California, who was one of the sport’s brightest stars when he was knocked out, two years ago, by Gervonta Davis, a stocky virtuoso from Baltimore. Afterward, Garcia’s life seemed to unravel: he ranted online, seemingly intoxicated, and was arrested for smashing up a hotel room. Somehow, in the midst of this, he pulled himself into the ring last year, at Barclays Center, in Brooklyn, and beat a top-ranked opponent named Devin Haney. But a few days later it was reported that Garcia had tested positive for ostarine, a performance-enhancing drug, the day before the fight, and he was banned from boxing for a year. The outcome was changed to “no contest.”
This was a fiasco, although, from a promotional perspective, not necessarily a disaster. Both men were motivated to seek redemption—Haney from the beating, Garcia from the positive test—and the controversy only made fans more curious to see them fight again. This backstory, too long to fit into a text message, was part of what gave the Times Square event its significance: Garcia and Haney were each fighting separately, against opponents they were favored to beat, in order to drum up interest in a future rematch. Garcia said that he was now clean and sober, and at a pre-fight press conference on Wednesday, at the Hammerstein Ballroom, Haney’s father and trainer, Bill Haney, claimed that Garcia looked different from the guy he had seen in Brooklyn. “This is not the same Ryan Garcia,” Bill Haney said, as Garcia fans in the balcony began to boo.
“I got multiple personalities, bitch,” Garcia replied. Bill Haney had many counter-arguments to make, but he was drowned out by the Garcia fans, who chanted, “Shut the fuck up! Shut the fuck up!”
A good fight always draws a crowd. This is the animating principle of the boxing industry, although the logistics of Times Square required a rather different approach. During the buildup, people associated with the fight encouraged fans to imagine a kind of boxing block party, with a sea of spectators enjoying the show; in one A.I.-generated image, fans filled the streets as far as you could see. “Times Square, half a million people watching on the street,” De La Hoya said, during a media event in March. “It’s going to be incredible.” But, as the event drew closer, it became clear that, rather than being an unusually public evening of boxing, this would be an unusually private one. There were about three hundred seats around the ring, which were mainly set aside for the famous and the well connected. The seats were encircled by tall chain-link fencing covered in promotional announcements, which made it impossible for the Times Square crowds to see the ring—and, for that matter, impossible for the people at ringside to see theTimes Square crowds. The veteran boxing journalist Thomas Hauser reported, in the Guardian, that the organizers had originally planned to show the fight on a number of the Times Square video screens, but were dissuaded by police officials, who wanted to prevent “rubber-necking.” A small viewing area with a screen had been set up at Forty-sixth Street, but boxing fans who came to midtown hoping to see a fight generally did not see much of anything.
Inside the fence, the atmosphere was oddly peaceful, and sometimes so quiet that the loudest noise was the whine of an overhead drone. Staffers rushed around, getting fighters and their entourages in and out of the enclosure and making sure the celebrity guests were comfortable. (At one point, a serious-looking woman could be overheard saying, into her headset, “Please get me a soft-serve vanilla ice-cream cone for Mike Tyson.”) The real theme of the evening was a complicated corporate and national synergy. The ring was emblazoned with the logo of The Ring, the boxing magazine, which was founded in 1922, and which was purchased last year by Alalshikh; in its new incarnation, the magazine seems to be both chronicling Alalshikh’s fights and helping to present them. Anyone who didn’t make it inside the fence could, for $59.99, watch the fight on DAZN, a British streaming network that is also a business partner of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. And the event’s top sponsor was Fatal Fury, a fighting game from SNK, a video-game company recently acquired by the foundation of Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince. A few feet away from the ring, the organizers had installed a PlayStation 5 and a couple of gaming chairs; between the real fights, the online celebrities IShowSpeed and K.S.I. staged a virtual one. To DAZN viewers of a certain age, this probably felt like the main event.
