From the left: Profesional boxers Melinda Watpool, Sukhdeep Singh Batt and Brandon Cook at the Pickering Casino Resort, in Pickering, Ont., on Jan. 25.Christopher Katsarov/The Globe and Mail
Tyler Buxton is used to selling out boxing shows.
The last tickets to the boxing events his company, United Promotions, stages in suburban Toronto typically disappear a few days before the opening bell. But demand for United’s latest fight card, at the Pickering Casino Resort, 45 kilometres east of downtown Toronto, surprised him. The event takes place this Saturday, but has been sold out since late December.
Buxton is not the only boxing industry veteran to notice, and benefit from, renewed consumer interest in a sport that, in Ontario, was once considered moribund. Saturday’s event is one of five events scheduled to take place in the province during the first quarter of 2023 – the same number of boxing cards in Ontario in all of 2013.
But new venues, new promoters and new ways to distribute content online have helped pro boxing re-establish a niche in the local sports market, and have Buxton thinking Southern Ontario could rival Montreal as a destination for major boxing events.
“The industry’s alive and well, and getting better and better,” Buxton said in an interview. “The sport was dead for so long. Now I honestly believe that in the next three to four years, going at this rate, we’ll have a better stable of fighters than Quebec.”
Buxton also said Toronto could become “Las Vegas North,” which was clearly hyperbole – but the numbers point to a boxing resurgence.
Last year, Ontario venues hosted 21 pro boxing shows, an emphatic rebound from 2020 and 2021, pandemic years that saw just four pro boxing shows in a 24-month span. Local promoters were even busier last year than they were between 2017 and 2019, when Ontario averaged 19 pro boxing events annually.
Most years before that, the number of pro boxing shows normally lingered in the single digits, with nine shows in 2015, and six in 2014. In 2013, the same year the louder, flashier, trendier Ultimate Fighting Championship drew 15,504 spectators to what was then called Air Canada Centre, Ontario saw just five pro boxing events.
The UFC closed its former Toronto office in 2016 and moved operations here into the space of its parent company, Endeavor (formerly WME-IMG), which acquired the UFC that year. It has not played host to a show in Toronto since 2018. Over that same span, boxing has expanded its local presence.
Promoters attribute the surge in late 2010s activity to a regime change at the Ontario Athletic Commission. Before he retired in 2016, the previous commissioner, Ken Hayashi earned a reputation as a capricious decision maker, who would invoke arcane rules to cancel bouts, and sometimes entire cards, on short notice.
And since restrictions related to the coronavirus pandemic have loosened, boxing promoters have been able to tap into pent-up demand among both customers and venues.
“Everyone’s eager to do things. There’s been a gap in all this content,” said Lee Baxter, whose company stages boxing cards at Rebel night club in Toronto. “If I walked into a music venue in 2018 or 2019 they would just say ‘Hit the road, Jack.’ There’s more of an awareness about [boxing] now.”
In recent years, boxing events have tended to occur at a handful of downtown Toronto venues, and at suburban arenas like the CAA Centre in Brampton, Ont. The arrival of Pickering Casino Resort – a $500-million facility that opened in July, 2021 – gives local promoters another option, and taps into a long-standing synergy between boxing and gambling.
“Boxing is a dynamic sport in a live setting, which lends itself well with the exciting environment of our resort,” said Wayne Odegard, general manager of Pickering Casino Resort, in an e-mail to The Globe. “Working with a local promoter to open the arena with this boxing event is a natural fit.”
Meanwhile, Red Owl Boxing, an upstart promotion, built a 1,000-seat event venue inside its Brampton headquarters, a modern version of an old-school fight club. But Red Owl, along with Baxter and United, is also one of several local promoters that partner with the streaming service DAZN, broadcasting cards that would otherwise remain house shows.
Red Owl Boxing’s president, Gabriel Fanous, sees the streaming deals as crucial, gaining exposure for fighters, and reaching young adult sports fans, who tend to consume content online.
“I have an office full of millennials. They know all about the UFC but don’t know anything about boxing,” Fanous said. “The UFC has been marketed better to the 18-to-34-year-old demographic, and that’s where boxing needs to get better.”
Saturday’s fight card in Pickering, Ont., will not be broadcast, but will rely on a familiar formula that sells VIP tables to corporate customers while b-side fighters from outside Canada matched against local favourites. Headliner Sukhdeep Singh Bhatti, lives in neighbouring Ajax, while co-main event boxer Brandon Cook grew up there, and Melinda Watpool – another fighter on Saturday’s card – trained there as a nationally ranked amateur.
“You have guys who normally carry their fan base across the GTA to Brampton staying in Durham,” Buxton said. “It’s kind of a no-brainer.”
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article said UFC closed its Toronto office. It has been updated to clarify that when the former UFC office closed, it moved operations to space owned by its parent company, Endeavor.