Float Like a Butterfly, Hustled Like a Rube

The timing was a little too convenient, don’t you think?

A week before the rewritten Senate version of the Muhammad Ali American Boxing Revival Act was formally introduced in the U.S. Senate, we saw what appeared to be a coordinated public-relations push centered around one person—Nico Ali Walsh.

As the grandson of the act’s legendary namesake and its most vocal critic, Ali Walsh had garnered considerable attention from those interested in the legislation, both in terms of how it might affect fighters as well as the sport in general.

Days after teasing that “much progress is being made” in “productive discussions” over reforms to the still-unpassed legislation, Ali Walsh appeared in a social media photo-op with manager Amer Abdallah and TKO Group board member Nick Khan.

Ali Walsh was even given a segment on TKO’s Paramount+ Zuffa Boxing broadcast on July 26, where he doubled down on his insistence that he’s all about fighting for the sport’s athletes.

Critics of the reworked Ali Act point to the removal of financial transparency requirements, protections against coercive contracts found in the original Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act of 2000, and limits on the legal recourse available to fighters with grievances.

Critics also argue that the revised act would primarily benefit TKO’s Zuffa Boxing, paving the way for a UFC-style league in which the company would create its own titles and rankings while adopting a UFC-like pay structure that leaves the vast majority of revenue—reportedly as much as 85%—with event organizers.

TKO Group—the parent company of the UFC and WWE and the driving force behind Zuffa Boxing alongside its Saudi partners—has publicly backed the legislation, with Khan personally testifying before the Senate in support of it.

Federal lobbying disclosures show that “Zuffa and Affiliates” retained the law firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck to lobby on behalf of the legislation. Combined with TKO Group’s public support for the measure and the extent to which its provisions appear tailored to Zuffa Boxing’s intended business model, critics have questioned just how much influence TKO had over the bill’s drafting.

But the legislation had stalled in the Senate. Negative public feedback—to an extent amplified by Ali Walsh’s heartfelt public remarks at the April Senate hearing—had apparently created doubt among enough senators for there to be a snag.

With progress stalled and a reworked version on the drawing board soon to be introduced, TKO’s sudden and very public embrace of its most important critic seemed impeccably well-timed.

In a July 27 interview with Sean Zittel and Radio Rahim, Ali Walsh explained his reason for talking with TKO and working on a compromise rewrite to submit before the Senate for a piece of legislation that he previously said “is not going to pass as it stands.”

“When we’re speaking with Ted Cruz’s office and all the Senate officials and all those people in the government, they’re not saying that the Revival Act is not going to pass at all,” Ali Walsh asserted. “They’re saying it’s going to pass, but it’s not going to pass the way it is. So what me and Amer and my team have been doing is we’ve been trying to add stuff to the act that will eventually pass that would better benefit us fighters...

“But the biggest things that we want to make sure is in this law that they eventually pass is financial transparency, just fighter pay in general, the contract lengths. There’s a list of things that we’re talking to the senators about, but adding that to the law would just make it better. I mean, keeping it the way it is, obviously, ideally, that’s the perfect world, right? But it’s going to pass in some form and we got to make sure that the form it passes in benefits us the fighters.”

The internet quickly split over Ali Walsh’s intentions. Some believed he was acting in good faith, while others accused him of selling out after meeting with TKO.

Then Thursday came and the reworked “Revival Act” was officially introduced to the Senate—with none of the features over which the fighter had supposedly engaged TKO.

Instead, the most significant changes arguably strengthened the legislation’s pro-Zuffa tilt.

For instance, limiting the contract period of a fighter’s first pro contract to a max of three years is being sold as a fighter-freedom feature. In reality, it handcuffs existing promoters while clearing a smoother path for cash-rich Zuffa to swoop in and sign young talent once others have absorbed the financial risk of developing them.

The newly inserted contract cap is an acknowledgment that Zuffa does not currently have the developmental infrastructure in place to bring along high-end prospects. Instead, they intend to rely on outside companies to bring that talent along and then step in to pick up the fighters who’ve made it through the rough and unprofitable early stages of their careers.

The change begs the question of why in the world a promoter would even bother to sign talent if all they’re guaranteed to see are the struggles and the financial losses of a prospect. Maybe that’s the point of this new “Revival Act” addition—to discourage competition while picking the pockets of those who remain.

The rewrite now also allows a qualified Unified Boxing Organization (UBO) to work with and rely upon existing sanctioning bodies in implementing their “championship system.”

This is, again, another change meant to benefit a UBO—which, for now, only applies to Zuffa Boxing.

It’s an acknowledgment that the wannabe rulers of boxing don’t have anything resembling a self-sustaining infrastructure in place yet and will need to lean on the established order to help bring legitimacy to their efforts. It’s also an acknowledgment that they may have overshot their target and underestimated just how much fans—and the fighters themselves—valued the traditional world title structure.

Another change was the pullback from the demand to eliminate secondary titles from the landscape. Nobody really cares about striking interim belts or silver belts from existence, no matter how much boxing nerds cry about the issue online. The change is again a Zuffa-friendly edit that serves as an indirect admission that TKO underestimated the importance of such titles and the value they could provide them as they built their own brand.

Notably missing from all of this was anything Ali Walsh and his people had supposedly been championing.

So, what happened?

Others have been diplomatic in this matter. Me, not so much. Nico Ali Walsh got played. After digesting this for a few days, I really don’t think he “sold out” or has been operating as some sort of double agent.

I just think he ran into an apex corporate predator with its eyes set on boxing and an entire political system built on aiding money men. He certainly wouldn’t be the first idealistic young man to discover that sincerity is no match for billion-dollar corporate strategy.

In the days before the revised bill surfaced, the optics suggested Ali Walsh and TKO were engaged in meaningful negotiations, teased as a sort of summit of differing viewpoints, ahead of the formal Senate introduction. The clear implication was that the rewritten legislation would reflect some compromise between the two sides. It didn’t.

“I understand, by the optics and by the public opinion, how it looks,” Ali Walsh told Zittel and Rahim. “A photo with me and Amer with Nick Khan. I understand how it looks...I felt that was the quickest way to a solution...I do feel that changes will now be expedited because we directly spoke to the source and told him what we feel needs to be changed.”

Things clearly didn’t work out that way.

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