According to a Jan. 23 report from Boxing Examiner Michele Emrick, Ashley Ferrara thinks boxing promoters need to market their ring girls in the same manner as MMA promotions like the UFC and Bellator.
The UFC features household names like Arianny Celeste and Brittney Palmer serving as ring girls. As for Bellator, the promotion has well-known celebrity starlets like Jade Bryce and Mercedes Terrell at events around the country.
The average fan doesn't know the names of the top ring card girls in the sport of boxing, and Ferrara thinks that is a major problem.
"It's one of the biggest things that boxing needs to change," Ferrera said on The Jeff Mayweather Show on Jan. 22 "You see what the UFC does. Every time you walk into any news stand, Arianny Celeste, Brittney Palmer, the UFC ring card girls, they are front and center. Boxing absolutely needs to get some of these named ring card girls that people can identify with. It's definitely a marketing value that's untapped. And that's one of the things I am most passionate about," she said when asked about the difference between being a ring card girl in boxing and MMA."
Ferrara thinks boxing promoters would easily make their money back by hiring well-known women as ring girls. She believes the marketing dollars they would bring to the table would make it all worth it for them.
"There's no reason that Top Rank can't have a named girl," Ferrara said. "The amount of marketing dollars these girls could pull into the sport, you may be able to develop programs like pensions and benefits with extra dollars around. It could be great for everybody."
This may be a classic chicken-and-egg scenario. Celeste and Palmer were not well-known prior to joining the UFC. They became famous from becoming UFC ring girls, not the other way around. The same goes for Bellator ring girls Bryce and Terrell.
That said, the problem is that boxing itself is on the decline. If boxing was as popular as it used to be, perhaps the sport's top ring girls would be more well-known.
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