Boxing Upgrade

There’s good news and bad news for Cebu Boxing. The good news is that the ALA Group has broken ground and become the first Pinoy group to stage a boxing event in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. Last Friday, Milan Melindo, Boom Boom Bautista and Larry Canillas all won by knock-out to formally announce that Cebu Boxing has landed in Dubai. The bad news is that with this latest venture into co-promoting fight cards abroad, it looks like the ALA Team might have more of these and less of local events (for obvious reasons), but we’ll dwell on this later.

We can all remember how Cebu Boxing was supposed to have been part of a big Dubai card featuring Nonito Donaire and Donnie Nietes defending their world championships around a year ago (or two?). But due to a few snags here and there, the event never took place and instead made Donaire and Nietes idle, something they didn’t need. There was so much hype, enthusiasm and anticipation for the big event, but I guess it simply wasn’t meant to be. So many stories have been told about the why and how the event never took place, but all that is part of history.

The better part of local boxing history is that ALA Promotions was able to finally move on with Friday’s project, albeit on a smaller scale, and even this one was almost scrapped.

But why boxing in Dubai? According to ALA’s partners in Dubai, they saw a potential in staging boxing events, targeting the overseas Pinoy workers as its primary target market. They expected Pinoys to pay and watch live boxing of high caliber Pinoy boxers from the Philippines in the same way that they follow international boxing on TV. Manny Pacquiao has done wonders in drawing Pinoys all over the world to the sport, and so the boxing interest was there, ripe for the picking. But since it was virtually impossible to bring the Pacman to Dubai, the next best thing was to bring over other top Pinoy prospects who could become world champions in the future. Initial negotiations were done between the Dubai team with the group led by Noli Eala but nothing came out of this except for a few exciting teasers. Then came the negotiations with ALA Promotions who worked for a smaller-scale event with a more competitive budget. My guess is this was the only workable scenario (for a first event) and so the show was set for April 9. Something happened along the way and it was almost called off until further negotiations turned out to finally push through with the event last Friday. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Making the crucial first step is often the most difficult and most important step to take in ventures like this, and I’d like to assume that all went well for both sides. However, we’ll have to wait for the assessment from both sides. For starters, I’d like to ask if many people went to watch the event. The news on line have been generous (to say the least) about crowd estimates, and so we don’t really know if many people showed up. Of this lot, how many were Pinoys? After all, they were the primary target market of the event. Or did the international market outnumber Pinoys? Note that in Cebu events, we also see a lot of foreigners or expats paying good money to get the best seats at venues like the Waterfront. Before the event, were the people looking forward to watching live boxing? How was ticket sales?

The Dubai partners aren’t strangers to staging events for Pinoys in Dubai. This is the same group that brings PBA teams to play in Dubai. It also produces concerts featuring top Pinoy artists to serenade the Pinoy music lovers there. These basketball games and concerts reportedly draw full-house crowds of largely Pinoy fans who miss their stars. And the latest venture was intended to wet the appetite of the boxing fans thirsting for real live action on top of the ring. Aside from boxing, they’re also into the staging of mixed martial arts events, but not for Pinoys. This is for the international market. The follow-through of fan support will be determined today when the fights will be televised this morning and later in the afternoon (I think). But this is more of a concern for ABS-CBN, the TV partners of the event.

An interesting twist of trivia to all this is how all the officials involved in the event were also from the Philippines. Since Dubai doesn’t have a professional boxing commission, the judges and referees all came from the Philippines. Be a judge (or referee) and see Dubai.

Bottom line is that if the event was a success, we’re definitely going to see more boxing events featuring Pinoys in Dubai. Cebu Boxing going truly international.

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