ULTIMATE BOXXER RETURNS
The inaugral event was a huge success, despite Big Narstie’s cameo
FOLLOWING its successful launch last month, the team behind Ultimate Boxxer, a one-night competition that crowns one champion from a starting field of eight, are set to announce a further three tournaments before the year is out. But potty-mouthed grime artist Big Narstie, whose infamous cameo almost stole the first show, will not be making a return.
“That won’t happen again, we’ve got to be more careful in the future,” Ben Shalom told Boxing News with a smile. The founder of the event admitted he was horrified when the rapper implored the crowd to get involved in an unexpected game of ‘who can shout obscenities the loudest’.
“We got a slap on the wrist for it and rightly so, you can’t have that going out on television. In another way, for our first event, it was comical in the best and worst possible way, in that it provided a talking point on social media and people switched over to watch. What they ended up seeing was how good the boxing was. But no, we will not be using Big Narstie again, but we still hope to have that crossover appeal.”
A total of 235,000 watched the broadcast on 5 Spike, and with 133,000 of those tuning-in live, the biggest in the station’s history, Shalom is rightfully delighted with how it all turned out. Welterweight prospect Drew Brown, who defeated Tom Young in the final, scooped the £16,000 star prize at the Manchester Arena on April 28 to cap an exciting evening of boxing, which was officially promoted by Carl Greaves.
“To be honest, the standard surpassed our expectations,” Shalom said about the thrills and spills. “We were concerned that the favourites had all been drawn together, but everything was high speed and there was high interest. That took everyone by surprise. It was really good, and Drew was a revelation.
“My only concern is what happens to the losers. We want to look after all the fighters, but seven of the eight ended up losing their unbeaten records. But in a three-round fight, in a competition like that, can you really call that a loss? All the competitors have been texting us and thanking us for the experience.”
Prior to the semi-finals going live on free-to-air TV, 250,000 watched the action on Facebook platform, Unilad. It was always the intention for the action to remain solely on social media, but due to the unpredictability of Facebook algorithms (the intelligence system which governs what appears on users’ timelines) a deal with 5 Spike was agreed just nine days before the inaugural event.
“The viewing figures on social media were remarkable in the current climate, and proved to us what we could really do,” Shalom continued. “Of course, we knew all along what we could do, but there was certainly some doubt out there. I was reading the opinions of some hardcore boxing fans who presumed just because they hadn’t read more about it that it had been marketed badly. But the hardcore only represent a small proportion of our target audience.”
Shalom is in talks with several broadcasters for the next event, yet the scale of the venue is likely to stay the same. Inside the arena, 3,500 paying punters were in attendance in April, which was some way short of Manchester Arena’s capacity, yet there are no plans to switch to a more intimate setting despite Shalom admitting they lost money on the April event.
“Modern venues can cater for what we need, change their layout and things like that. Finding the exact venue to fit [our needs in terms of attendance] is difficult, and the arena setting allows us to stamp our authority on the event.”
So the show will go on for Ultimate Boxxer, with the next event scheduled for September in London, with a selection of prospects from the light-heavyweight division. “We lost money but we went over and above just trying to establish and prove ourselves. Now we’ve proven what we can do, we won’t lose money ever again. We know what we’re capable of.”