The promoter war headed into Saturday’s Garcia vs. Benn card just got its answer, and it is an anticlimax delivered in the flattest voice available.
Asked by Brian Campbell on Paramount’s fight week programming whether this week would finally produce the long-awaited Dana White and Oscar De La Hoya fireworks, White shut the door without raising his voice: “I don’t think Oscar and I are going to run into each other,” he said, adding that De La Hoya will be at the fight but that no interaction is planned. Then came the part with news in it: Garcia, White noted, is under contract with De La Hoya, and after Saturday night has exactly one fight left on that deal.
That single sentence settles a question that has run all week. Reports had differed on whether Saturday was the final fight on Garcia’s Golden Boy contract or whether one remained after it. White, who has every reason to know, says one more. The countdown to the biggest free agency in boxing now has an official length: two fights, one of them happening in 48 hours.
The wave-off completes a fight week in which De La Hoya has been a ghost at his own fighter’s event. He was absent from Thursday’s final press conference, where White hosted, both fighters appeared, and the co-main took the stage. Asked earlier in the week about De La Hoya’s role and whether the two would share a stage, White’s entire answer was “you answered your own question.”
It was not supposed to go this way, according to Oscar. In June he predicted the press conferences might be more interesting than the fight because of him and White going at it. In July he was left off the New York launch stage and told Ariel Helwani the exclusion was deliberate, that his line to Turki Alalshikh had gone dead, and that “Turki picked Dana White to run boxing in the US, that’s his guy.” His own fighter, asked that same weekend what role his lifelong promoter has in this fight, gave the answer that has aged into an epitaph: “Not a lot, I guess.”
Nine years of war, chronicled in full in our definitive history of the feud, and it ends not with the two men going at it a few feet apart, but with one of them running the show and shrugging at the other’s name. There is no cease-and-desist for indifference. De La Hoya will be in the building Saturday watching his champion defend a belt at the center of a card he has no visible hand in, with a contract clock at two fights and counting. The feud is not over. It has simply stopped being a fight between equals, and everyone on that stage Thursday knew it.
