It only dawned on me when thinking of ideas for this week’s column that five of the last six press conferences I have watched all featured and were used to sell fights involving boxers who have failed performance-enhancing drugs tests. 

That it only dawned on me then suggests not only how common failed tests have become but also how the issue of performance-enhancing drugs has become secondary to the many other issues going on in boxing at this present time. 

Indeed, much of the impetus to write about press conferences involving fighters who have flunked PED tests stems from a lack of interest in everything else happening at the moment, a lot of it too bizarre and confusing to decode. It distracts, for instance, from Wednesday’s news that Turki Alalshikh and TKO have signed a multi-year partnership to establish a new boxing promotion anchored by UFC President Dana White and WWE President Nick Khan. “We have the same vision; I trust that,” Alalshikh said in a statement. “This league in a short time will crush everything.”

Fighting talk, absolutely, if anybody has the power to “crush” anything in boxing right now it is Alalshikh. Already, in fact, there are plans to do away with world titles and for Riyadh Season and The Ring, his magazine, to host boxing events in New York’s Times Square and on Alcatraz Island, confirmation that boxing is still Alalshikh’s favorite plaything. Whether the “crushing” of which he speaks will involve those with whom Alalshikh once held hands, including two notable British promoters, remains to be seen, but never has Alalshikh sounded so enthused about working with a fight promoter. 

What boxing will become, as both a sport and industry, as a result of this hookup is anyone’s guess. Yet it is no stretch to say that it will resemble something very different going forward and that the audience designed to embrace it is already being built and fed. That goes for the fighters, the fans, and also the media, all of whom, in an ideal world, will possess a level of ignorance and/or willingness to set aside their integrity to see only what they want to see and hear only what they want to hear. 

In that respect the reintroduction of “drug cheats” to main events is a good starting point, or test. After all, if we can now get away with slipping these men into press conferences and having them discuss their past and future unopposed, without anybody so much as raising a hand, it begs the question: What can’t boxing’s latest landlords get away with? Have they already cultivated a legion of tenants so subservient that they can basically do and say what they want and people will only judge them and the health of the sport based on whatever appears on the next Riyadh Season menu? Seemingly so. 

However, for all the noise and diversion tactics, the sight of fighters who have failed performance-enhancing drugs tests being not only welcomed back in big-money fights but considered commodities despite their transgressions is both symbolic and a worrying thing to normalise. So too is the direction the sport seems to be going in as far as how these fighters and their fights are being sold. Last week, for example, we had an incident involving Chris Eubank Jnr and Conor Benn which capitalised on chaos and was condemned and celebrated all at once. Then this week we had a press conference in Times Square featuring Ryan Garcia and Rolly Romero, as well as the shy and retiring Teofimo Lopez, with the emphasis again on chaos and the ever-alluring prospect of somebody saying or doing something stupid. The entire press conference, in fact, appeared designed for this and it was hard, when watching it, not to see the whole thing as somewhat reckless and exploitative, even by boxing’s standards. 

These men, after all, are varying degrees of troubled. Meaning if, heaven forbid, your daughter or sister ever brought one of them home with her, it would be cause not for celebration but rather an intervention. You would sit her down and talk to her. You would do all you could to save her. 

That is not to say these men are necessarily bad, nor that all boxers must be men you want around the dinner table. But to instigate conflict between characters whose mental health has been questioned – and indeed used as an excuse – within the last 12 months seems negligent, at best, and a clue as to the direction in which the sport is potentially heading. 

Perhaps the truth is that these men are no longer seen as human beings in the eyes of those who can make money from them. Perhaps instead they are not even boxers anymore, but more akin to influencers: characters they can use to sell products, events, or messages; characters who can raise attention via their wild antics and their desperation to go viral. 

That Times Square press conference certainly had that feel to it, and to witness clips from another press conference held earlier that day involving KSI and Dillon Danis, a couple of “influencers”, served to only strengthen this view. Those two, KSI and Danis, had been performing the same dance as everyone else and it was no easy task telling Tuesday’s two press conferences apart. They had the same look. They had the same sounds. They had even the same stench of desperation, with KSI finally slapping Danis in the face with a pancake, inspired no doubt by Eubank Jnr and his jacket of eggs the previous week. 

Still, the one positive in all this is that no matter how it’s exploited from this point on, boxing cannot be brought into disrepute anymore or sink much lower in the eyes of the general public. There is, it could be argued, even a certain relief and freedom in accepting that, for one no longer feels obliged to defend the indefensible. Nor, given everything we now know, is there the collective energy to question “drug cheats” or even wonder what should be done about them these days. 

On that note it is impossible to say. If they are free to fight, it would be unfair to stop them and, besides, mistakes are all part of being human and must one day be forgiven. Therefore, whether at press conferences or elsewhere, those who have fallen foul of the testers cannot be publicly shamed or reminded at every turn of their wrongdoing, as appealing as it might be. If cleared, they are pretty much beyond reproach, back to boasting with impunity. 

And yet, anyone who has ever attended a fight which ended with a boxer killed or seriously injured, or spoken with those connected to a tragedy, or investigated the impact of PEDs, will have a very different perspective on drugs in boxing than those new to the sport who approach it as though a video game or merely something to post about for engagement. It is, for them, not a trivial matter deserving of only a shrug. It is certainly not something that should be rewarded with lots of money and a bigger stage. 

Instead, for them, the best course of action is this: Alcatraz Island, some time in June. Winner stays on.