Fat City: Heavyweight History in Sensitive Settings

Welcome back to the Bill Bradley Collective, where this week it is the latest installment in our season-wide focus on sportswashing, with the spotlight focused on boxing. Perhaps the sport’s preeminent power-broker, promoter Eddie Hearn has staged two heavyweight championship fights: a 2019 tilt featuring Andy Ruiz and Anthony Joshua and a 2022 bout between the aforementioned Joshua and Oleksandr Usyk in Saudi Arabia. How and why these fights, contested for the sport’s showcase prize, could occur in such a locale with a record so poor on human rights set the table for a conversation that works in reverse chronology. 1974’s George Foreman/Muhammad Ali “Rumble in the Jungle” and 1975’s Ali/Joe Frazier “Thrilla in Manila” were contests of the highest profile, perhaps the two most famous in heavyweight championship history, controversially staged in Zaire and the Philippines, respectively. Both promoted by the ever-problematic Don King, these bouts and their eventually decided host venues laid the groundwork for Hearn’s modern appeal to the cash-rich coiffeurs of Saudi Arabia and their vast Public Investment Fund. It is a discussion of then and now, presented with a shot of fight nerd discourse and a broader chaser consideration of sportwashing in a sport where such a thing has existed for half a century or more. It’s this week, on the Bill Bradley Collective.