Toney Signs With the UFC, But Why?

The obviously mutual interest between former multiple-division boxing champion James Toney and the UFC has always been puzzling to me.  This is especially true when thinking about why Dana White would even entertain such an idea as putting Toney in the cage.  Knowing that White was a boxing fan for all of his life, I chalked it all up to Toney probably being a fighter that White was a fan of.  For months, as Toney “stalked” White and attended multiple UFC events, it seemed as if White maybe just didn’t have the heart to tell Toney that he wouldn’t last five minutes against even a mid-level MMA fighter.

But then, a funny thing happened.  By funny, I mean “really freaking weird,” actually.  The UFC went and signed Toney, who enjoyed a successful career as a boxer who retired with a record of 72-6-3.  Now, the 41-year old will try to learn how to wrestle and defend submission attempts well enough to give himself a chance to…what, exactly?  Not get embarrassed?  Survive all three rounds?

Actually, I shouldn’t question Toney’s motives, which are actually quite clear.  Toney hasn’t been a marketable boxer for years, and he is smart enough to see that if the opportunity exists to get paid for a few fights in the UFC, that money will be considerably better than the zero dollars and zero cents he would make by not taking advantage of the opportunity.  While anyone who fought over 80 professional boxing matches is clearly wired differently than most of us anyway, I also have to give props to Toney for getting into a sport where he will be at a decided disadvantage much of the time.  We can debate all day long whether it’s a good idea, but Toney’s motives are understandable.

Who knows?  Maybe he just wants to compete and see how well he can do?  Can we really begrudge him for that desire, either?  Of course not.  If there is someone to shake your finger at here, it’s not Toney, who at worst is guilty of naivety.

Dana White’s interest is still puzzling, though.  Am I going to sit here and say that there isn’t still money to be made in a fight that takes advantage of the “boxing vs. MMA” feud that just won’t die?  No way.  Why Toney, though?  White himself has scoffed before at boxers such as Roy Jones, Jr. and Floyd Mayweather, who both had the audacity to speculate as to how well they would perform inside the cage.  Now, all of a sudden, the UFC signs Toney?  It doesn’t add up.

Perhaps it does, though.  Toney knows that he does not have the relevancy that other successful boxers have at this point, and he is in a worse bargaining position than Jones, Jr. and certainly Mayweather would be.  The UFC would be hard pressed to get either of them for under seven figures.  Toney, though?  Maybe he represented a lucrative “boxer vs. MMA fighter” bout at a low price.  Toney is a credible, if not hugely popular, boxer and will represent ticket sales and pay-per-view buys not because he’s James Toney, but because he can actually represent “boxing”.

Still, you have to wonder why the UFC would choose to do this now.  While the organization has put on some almost cringe-worthy matchups before that had little to do with rankings and a lot with morbid curiosity (Gracie-Hughes comes to mind), the game has changed now.  The UFC has no real competition and can put dozens of combinations of fighters on a card and get the same result: millions of dollars of ticket sales and thousands of pay-per-view buys.  Sure, White brought in Kimbo Slice, but it made sense because he was willing to be a huge ratings draw on “The Ultimate Fighter” to get into the promotion’s doors.  It’s not as if White is building Slice to be the figurehead of the company, like EliteXC tried to do.

In this case, maybe it has to do with the low cost and large profit that could come from signing Toney for a fight or two.  Maybe part of it has to do with White admiring Toney, or even his desire to stick it to professional boxing a little bit for mocking the sport back in the day.  It could be any or all of those things.  At the end of the day, I don’t take the sport so seriously that I become outraged at a fight that has no real relevance in the rankings.  However, I do have one bone to pick.

Many have called out White already for signing a boxer who is over 40 years old to fight in “the Super Bowl of mixed martial arts,” especially after White mocked other organizations for making similar moves (like when Strikeforce signed former college and pro football great Herschel Walker).  However, my problem here is quite the reverse.  I don’t have an issue with the UFC signing Toney, really.  I just think that if White is going to make a move like this, he needs to cut some slack to supposedly “lesser” promotions who are using the same tricks to try and make lucrative fights.

You can’t have it both ways.

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Tags: boxing, Dana White, James Toney, Kimbo Slice, UFC