Dana White's Battle Plan in Boxing: Garcia and Benavidez Targeted

Dana White hasn’t just walked into boxing. He’s walked in with a battle plan.

Zuffa Boxing’s early headline signings, Conor Benn and Jai Opetaia, were sold as franchise stars. In truth, they’re leverage. Smart, expensive leverage being used to prise open the doors to the two names that really matter to TKO right now: Ryan Garcia and David Benavidez.

Both are one fight away from free agency. Both have already had a taste of life outside their traditional promotional homes. And both are now staring at a future in which Dana White is holding the chequebook and the spotlight.

Garcia’s wandering eye

The fracture between Ryan Garcia and Oscar De La Hoya is no secret. It’s been there for years, bubbling under every press conference, every social media flare-up, every legal filing. Garcia has long looked like a fighter searching for someone else to believe in him the way he believes in himself.

That glimpse came in April 2023 against Gervonta “Tank” Davis.

That night, under the PBC and Showtime banner, Garcia finally saw what a full-throttle, big-room promotion looks like when every gear is turning for him. The numbers were staggering: 1.2 million pay-per-view buys, a $22.8 million gate, a genuine event that cut through the wider sports landscape.

He went home, looked at what he had with Golden Boy, and sued to get out.

He didn’t succeed then. Contractual reality bit back. But time has moved on. Garcia is now down to his last fight with Golden Boy, and Zuffa has spent the past year building a runway for him to land on.

The Benn deal was the first major step. TKO and Zuffa Boxing paid Benn more than $30 million over two fights, and the logic wasn’t complicated. Benn is a name, a draw, a lightning rod in the UK. But he was also a bridge. A bridge to Garcia.

When Garcia faced Benn, he felt something familiar: the “Tank” feeling. Big arena, heavy promotion, relentless content, the sense that every camera in the sport was trained on him. The event lived on Paramount+, but the branding, the tone, the voice driving the week all screamed Zuffa and TKO.

Garcia noticed. So did everyone else.

He told Uncrowned on Monday how happy he was working with Dana White’s outfit. It sounded less like a fighter doing polite media and more like a man seeing his next move laid out in front of him.

De La Hoya, tellingly, was a ghost. No presence in the build-up. No role on fight week. No appearance on fight night. The optics were deliberate. To the public, Garcia already looks like a Zuffa fighter. Zuffa has made sure of that.

Breaking Eddie Hearn’s heart

Conor Benn’s move to Zuffa wasn’t just about Garcia. It was also a direct hit on Eddie Hearn.

For years, Benn sat on the Matchroom mantle alongside Katie Taylor and Anthony Joshua as one of Hearn’s homegrown pillars. Benn turned pro with Matchroom, grew with them, and, crucially, stayed with them through the storm of multiple failed tests for clomiphene. Hearn defended him, backed him, and fought for his career when others wanted him buried.

Those are the moments promoters convince themselves loyalty is permanent.

Then Benn walked.

His exit delivered a cold message to Hearn and every other established promoter: nobody is untouchable. No relationship is safe. If you can’t match the new money, you can’t keep the fighter.

Bob Arum once warned: “Don’t fall in love with your fighters because they will break your heart.” De La Hoya has lived that lesson. Now Hearn has, too.

For Zuffa, Benn has already paid off in other ways. He’s a major star in UK boxing, a magnet for attention and controversy, and his arrival helped Zuffa secure a lucrative UK television deal with Sky Sports. That instantly expanded its footprint in one of the sport’s most important markets.

But Benn was also a signal flare. A warning shot that the old order is vulnerable, and that TKO is prepared to spend heavily to prove it.

Opetaia, Benavidez and the next big play

On the Garcia-Benn undercard, Jai Opetaia delivered exactly what Zuffa needed from him. He broke down Noel Mikaelian and stopped him in nine, then grabbed the microphone and called out David Benavidez.

Benavidez was right there at ringside. He climbed through the ropes, stared down the Australian, and the picture told its own story. Cruiserweight suddenly has a potential super-fight. And Zuffa is in the middle of it.

Benavidez, “The Mexican Monster,” is also approaching the end of his current deal. He has one fight left with PBC and promoter Sampson Lewkowicz. Dana White has not bothered to hide his interest; Benavidez is high on his hit list.

Benavidez’s career has been defined by frustration as much as violence. At 168 pounds, he became the most proven contender in the division but never got Saul “Canelo” Alvarez. At 175, he tried to chase Dmitry Bivol and Artur Beterbiev but never shared the ring with either. Now, at cruiserweight, he finally has a path to the No. 1 man in the division: Opetaia.

The stakes are obvious. Beat Opetaia, and Benavidez can make a real case as the sport’s pound-for-pound king. He has already shown he’s a legacy fighter, the kind who wants the best names, the toughest assignments, the matchups people tell him he can’t win. Offer him Oleksandr Usyk at heavyweight and he’d likely say yes on instinct.

Zuffa knows that. So it has parked a world-class champion and a mountain of money right in front of him.

Garcia and Benavidez have already floated the idea of sharing a card next May. If Zuffa lands Garcia as a free agent, getting Benavidez in for at least one fight becomes a far easier sell. And one fight might be all it takes. One night under the Zuffa machine, one taste of that scale and pay, could be enough to turn a one-off into a long-term alliance.

It worked that way for Garcia. Zuffa is betting it can work again.

Opetaia vs the belts

Jai Opetaia is more than a dance partner for Benavidez. He’s also a weapon in Zuffa’s simmering war with boxing’s sanctioning bodies.

That conflict has quietened on the surface as Zuffa has done more business with the WBC, WBA, IBF and WBO. But the endgame hasn’t shifted. Dana White still wants to strip power away from the alphabet organizations.

Opetaia’s recent history hands him ammunition.

The Australian has been widely viewed as the best cruiserweight in the world, yet the belts keep slipping away from him in boardrooms, not rings. In March, the IBF stripped him of its title. On Saturday, he beat WBC champion Noel Mikaelian, only for that belt to be declared vacant less than 48 hours later.

To the public, it looks absurd. The man most observers see as the top cruiserweight walks around without a recognized world title, while the sanctioning bodies shuffle paperwork and reshuffle rankings.

Opetaia hasn’t taken it quietly. After the IBF stripped him, he filed a lawsuit accusing the organization of unlawfully removing his title in retaliation for signing with Zuffa. He’s not just a symbol of the problem; he’s the vehicle through which Zuffa can directly challenge the system.

For a promotion that wants to undermine the old alphabet power structure, having the consensus No. 1 in a division frozen out of belts is almost too perfect a case study.

The endgame

Benn and Opetaia were headline-grabbing moves, but they were never the final destination.

Benn dragged Zuffa into Ryan Garcia’s orbit and landed a heavy shot on Eddie Hearn. Opetaia opened a lane to David Benavidez and provided a live, breathing argument against the sanctioning bodies’ grip on the sport.

The real prize sits just over the horizon.

Garcia and Benavidez are poised to become the two defining American faces of boxing in the post-Canelo era. Zuffa hasn’t signed either of them yet. But before they’ve even hit the open market, Dana White has laid out the bait, built the stages, and shown them exactly what life under his banner could look like.

TKO’s war on boxing is only just beginning. The question now is simple: when the contracts expire and the calls come in, which side of the line will the sport’s next two generals choose to stand on?