Golden Boy Promotions founder and former five-weight champion, Oscar de la Hoya, isn’t the only one to express criticism recently of Ring Magazine as mainstream media outside the boxing bubble published concerns this week, too.
The 53-year-old sold the publication to Turki Alalshikh in 2024 for a reported $10 million but said Wednesday on The Ariel Helwani Show that he regrets doing so.
“Do I regret it? The way things are going, I actually do,” de la Hoya told Helwani. “And I never regret anything.”
“When I had the Ring Magazine I kept its integrity. I kept the panel of writers from all over the world who were deciding who’s number one, who’s number two, making sure its integrity is in place,” he said. “And I could have sustained it forever if I wanted to.
“But Turki came along and I thought I was selling it to a person who really cared for the sport and was going to uphold its integrity, but I guess I was wrong.”
Earlier in the interview, de la Hoya said: “I really do think that the Ring rankings are out the window. I don’t think there’s any integrity there, whatsoever.
“The Ring belt, the Ring Magazine was everything for a 100 years, let’s say, and now it can just be in the trash can. Might as well. It means nothing.
“The Zuffa belt, this pen is worth more than the Zuffa belt. This here is worth more than the Zuffa belt. It means nothing, it’s just a name.”
Watch the segment right here:
de la Hoya’s Isn’t Alone in His Criticism of Ring Magazine
“Century-old publication is said to have been ‘weaponised’ since acquisition by state powerbroker Turki Alalshikh,” wrote mainstream media outlet The Telegraph on the same day de la Hoya vented to Helwani.
In The Telegraph’s report, it says the self-proclaimed ‘Bible of Boxing’ has “seemed to abandon any pretence of neutrality” in its new ownership, pointing to a recent social media post in which Ring Magazine leaned on un-sourced “rumors” that “Queensberry is in financial trouble” and tickets for the Fabio Wardley vs Daniel Dubois were struggling to sell, even though they were only on pre-sale that day.
In the same report, veteran boxing reporter Thomas Hauser, Muhammad Ali’s biographer, said Ring’s print product was “pretty clean” with no real “overtly partisan editorial content” but that the digital version was different.
“It’s highly unlikely that you will see anything critical about the Saudi boxing programme on the website,” said Hauser. “And that’s nothing new. When it was owned by Golden Boy, it wouldn’t trash Golden Boy.”
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