“Kill or be killed.” It sounds like a tagline from a horror movie, but instead it’s a promotional motto used by “Sparring Club,” a name that may be new to you but has been making headlines in the United States due to a deeply disturbing incident.
Around fifty professional boxers, recruited on a voluntary basis, were thrown into the ring in front of an electrified crowd and urged to fight. No pre-fight medical exams, no weigh-ins, no referees, no effort to match fighters of similar skill and experience, no one ready to step in if a KO occurred. Believe it or not, all this happened in Brooklyn just a month ago — and now a very detailed report on the matter has been published by Thomas Hauser in The Guardian.
Sparring Club is the brainchild of British company BoxRaw, a brand specializing in combat sports apparel and equipment. The “sparring session” in question took place on July 11 at the Greenpoint Terminal Warehouse in Brooklyn and was jointly promoted by BoxRaw and The Ring. It was advertised with a flyer featuring a snarling, teeth-baring dog. The captions alongside the beast promised sparring between New York’s top prospects, hinting at the event’s violent nature with the words: Raw. Handpicked. Dog eat dog.
A sizable crowd gathered around the ring on the designated day, but the promotional campaign wasn’t aimed only at spectators. The organizers also needed to recruit fighters, so they dangled an irresistible carrot: a spot on the undercard of the mega-event between Saul “Canelo” Alvarez and Terence Crawford for the two boxers who made the biggest impression. This, too, was stated plainly on the flyer.
After all, the current owner of The Ring is none other than the extremely powerful Saudi official Turki Alalshikh, who is organizing the highly anticipated September 13 showdown and who personally attended the Sparring Club event on July 11. At his side was British promoter Eddie Hearn, who didn’t stay long, as he had to head over to watch the third fight between Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano.
Now imagine taking dozens of professional boxers, matching them up without any logical criteria, and having them spar with the promise that the most impressive performers will be handed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to leap forward in their careers. You can see for yourself that the odds of something going wrong were well above zero.
That afternoon in the ring, a bit of everything happened. Some fighters stuck to actual sparring, pulling their punches. Others climbed through the ropes with the intention of tearing the place apart. Inevitably, someone got hurt.
The most troubling and dangerous episode involved 33-year-old Jacob Solis, a modest-level fighter whose professional record of 7 wins and 1 draw was built against very soft opposition. That day, Solis found himself across from Marquis Taylor — a completely different caliber of opponent. Taylor is ranked 13th in the WBC middleweight division and has 21 professional bouts under his belt, with 18 wins, 1 loss, and 2 draws.
After trapping his “sparring partner” against the ropes and rocking him, Taylor finished the job with two vicious punches to the back of Solis’s head, sending him crashing face-first to the canvas. No one rushed into the ring to check on him. No one helped him to his feet. Solis walked back to the locker room alone, without assistance, and went home in a taxi. Days later, a neurological examination confirmed he had suffered a concussion.
It’s almost unnecessary to stress how disgusting, dangerous, and reprehensible this is, not to mention the severe damage it does to boxing’s public image. What makes it even more disturbing is that this sorry spectacle was financed and backed by the man who calls himself “His Excellency”: the enigmatic Turki Alalshikh, to whom most of the boxing industry, lured by his seemingly bottomless funds, has rolled out and continues to roll out the red carpet.
Boxe Punch expresses its full outrage at what happened and hopes political and sporting authorities will take serious measures to ensure such events never happen again. Sadly, barring an unexpected U-turn, that hope will be dashed against reality in just a few days, as another Sparring Club session is scheduled for August 15 in Riyadh. This time the flyer promises “Food, drinks and chaos.” The fighters, meanwhile, will be billed as “the Middle East’s top prospects.” We can only hope no one gets seriously hurt.
At the 5:05 mark of the following video, you can watch the sparring sequence between Solis and Taylor referenced in this article: