By Matteo Alderson

HBO and Showtime are at war and the battle between their boxing telecasts is a microcosm of the war that’s going on in the world of big business between their two parent companies, media giants AOL-Time Warner and Viacom.  In the arena of televised boxing, these two companies do battle at least twice a month, trying to establish their uncontested dominance and ownership of an entire sporting franchise.  Unlike other major professional sports such as the NFL and the NBA where each sport has consolidated itself under one organizational entity, boxing doesn’t function under the auspices of one dominant organization.  So in order to televise a boxing match the networks don’t have to negotiate with a major organization for the right to televise it.

In other major sports, the networks have to sign multi-million dollar long terms contracts.  Fox just closed a deal with the BCS for 320 million dollars for the rights to televise the three biggest college football bowl games for a four-year period.  They also recently signed long-term contracts with the NFL and Major League baseball for almost 7 billion dollars.  And I’m not even gong to touch upon the deals involving the NBA.  Professional sports are big business folks, corporate business, and a lot of companies don’t want to make the investment necessary in order for their network to have an established sport.  HBO televised Wimbledon for twenty-five years and they chose not to renew their contract in 2000 when it became obvious that the price to televise Tennis’s premiere event was going to increase substantially, beyond what HBO was willing to pay.

This is where boxing comes into the fold.  HBO and Showtime don’t have to sign long-term contracts in order to televise fights, they just have to allocate funds to an annual programming budget.  Seriously the major networks don’t even know the opportunity that they are missing out on.  Imagine if lets say NBC, allocated 24 millions dollars a year to buying fights then another 10 million dollars a year in programming costs.  That means they would be able to buy one match up a week for five hundred thousand dollars.  Think about the possible matches, they would be limitless and they could all be top quality.  You could buy a Rafael Marquez-Eric Morel fight for a half million dollars or even a Samuel Peter-Dominick Guinn fight.  And this type of quality programming that utilizes pre-fight commentary to expose the viewer to each individual fighter would significantly increase boxing’s as well as the network’s fan base.  The network could do this for a mere 34 million dollars a year without committing itself to a long-term venture.  But the bigwig executives are oblivious to the fact that boxing has a very large core fan base and that it’s telecasts have historically exhibited the ability to continuously earn consistent ratings.  Also, in other major sports, the games are already scheduled, but in dealing with boxing the network executives would have to handle a lot more responsibility because as you already know, HBO and Showtime just don’t televise boxing, they take a major hand in making the matches and even promoting them.  Thus network executives would have to step outside the world of television and into the world of boxing.  Quite frankly I think it scares the shit out of them.

The cable networks are a different story because they don’t have the budgets to sign a pact with a major sports franchise so they’ve gotten into the boxing business because it allows them to control one of the major traditional sports without having to deal with all of the ramifications involved with doing business with one of the oligopolistic sport organizations such as the NBA or the NFL.

HBO has been involved with the sport since the first Foreman-Frazier fight in 1973 and has really dominated and controlled the sport since the late 1980’s when the major free television networks stopped investing in it.  One of the things that really legitimized HBO as thee premiere boxing network is when it televised Marvin Hagler’s middleweight defenses in the early 80’s.  HBO further validated its place as the home to major boxing when it financially backed the heavyweight unification tournament in 1986 and broadcasted Mike Tyson’s initial title reign.  Since then HBO has continuously showcased the best fighters in the game except for a few occasions when their rival, Showtime, got hold of one of boxing’s superstars. Realistically Showtime can’t overtake HBO as the worlds premiere boxing network, but sometimes they compete with them and even win a battle here and there.

Showtime got involved with boxing in 1986 and in the fall of 1991 Don King used his contractual association with Mike Tyson to negotiate a deal with Showtime that not only brought Mike Tyson to the cable network, but made Don King Showtime’s exclusive promoter.  Meaning that Showtime was not allowed to work with another promoter.  This basically gave Don full control of Showtime’s boxing programming, something that then President of HBO sports, Seth Abraham would not concede to.  HBO and Don King have stated that Tyson would have stayed with the network, but that HBO wouldn’t concede to King’s request of having Larry Merchant sit out the Tyson telecasts, like he did for De La Hoya’s fight with David Kamau after making some negative comments about Mariachi music during the Whitaker-De La Hoya telecast.  It was more than that, the executives at HBO have huge egos and they weren’t going to let Don King dictate to them.

That Spring Tyson fought two lucrative pay per view bouts with Razor Ruddock and it seemed like Showtime’s coup had been successful, but then Tyson was found guilty of rape the very next spring in 1992.  During Tyson’s incarceration Don King worked harder than ever and finally turned Julio Cesar Chavez into a superstar.  During this entire time HBO was still doing their thing.  They had a number of good fighters and controlled the Heavyweight Champion, Evander Holyfield.  In actuality the fact that their rival, Showtime, had boxing’s biggest star was a thorn in their foot.  Here they were, supposedly the premiere boxing network and they didn’t have one of the most popular fighters in the history of the sport.  This is when the rivalry between Showtime and HBO really began because before the Tyson coup, HBO really didn’t concern itself with Showtime and hardly viewed them as a competitor, but after losing Tyson, the executives at HBO really developed a competitive animosity towards Showtime. 

While Tyson was in jail Don King spent his time concentrating on Chavez and finally made him a star while HBO also had a special talent in Pernell Whitaker who was basically the same size as Chavez, but didn’t have his star power or box office appeal.  As a result when a match was made between the two in September of 1993, HBO had to concede to letting Pernell out of the terms of his HBO exclusivity contract for one bout in order to fight Chavez on Showtime Pay per view.  Although the bout was scored a draw, it was monumentous victory for Whitaker and HBO because everybody and anybody who saw the fight knows that Whitaker won it. The decision is still considered one of the worst in boxing history. Afterwards the executives at HBO further showed their disdain for Showtime by constantly claiming that they weren’t bothered by not having Chavez and Tyson because they had the best fighters in the world.  A win for Pernell Whitaker had actually been a win for HBO because one of their staple fighters had beaten and taken away some of the box office appeal from one of Showtime’s prized possessions.

 

The competition between Showtime and HBO continued well into 1994 when Oliver McCall upset Lennox Lewis in two rounds to win the WBC heavyweight title.  During the post-fight interview, which was televised live on HBO, Oliver screamed out, “Showtime baby, the number one boxing network.”  Larry Merchant was so disgusted by this that he immediately pulled the microphone from McCall.  That night the HBO commentators tried to conjure up a conspiracy theory by telling the audience that the fight had been stopped prematurely and that the referee’s connections and qualifications were questionable.   This biased commentary didn’t’ overshadow the clean knockout that McCall had scored over Lewis, but it shed light on the fact that the entire HBO team was biased against Showtime/Don King fighters.

The rivalry continued, but the aspect of it has changed drastically because of a few things.  First Don King and HBO renewed their relationship.  King had Felix Trinidad and Evander Holyfield and HBO wanted to put Tito in with Oscar and Evander in with Lewis so they started working together.  This also had ramifications on Don King’s relationship with Showtime because immediately after Holyfield fought Lennox on HBO, Bob Arum showed the first Tapia-Ayala match on Showtime Pay Per View.  It was the first time that Showtime had worked with Arum since King’s contract had begun.  Although I don’t know the true parameters of the contract, it is obvious that King chose to end his tenure as Showtime’s exclusive promoter by choosing to let HBO use his biggest stars.  The second aspect of the relationship that has changed is that Mike Tyson isn’t that much of a factor in the boxing world anymore because he’s lost a few times and he’s hardly active.  Plus he lost to Lewis when HBO and Showtime made the historic Lewis-Tyson fight.  That fight was so big and there was so much money to be made that HBO and Showtime agreed to split the profits and to allow the winning fighter’s network to televise the fight a week later.  Lastly Seth Abraham, the executive that had originally been HBO’s representative when King and Tyson bolted, went to work for Madison Square Garden.

Today King is still fighting with HBO because they still won’t let him have control over their telecasts and Larry Merchant is still taking on the air shots at King.   Recently Don has been so disgruntled by his lack of personal airtime on the network that he has been threatening to start his own boxing channel.  Showtime is still going strong, even without Don and has tried to stay away from bumping heads with HBO by having their fights the first weekend of every month so that HBO knows when to expect a big fight on the network.  HBO doesn’t really care and recently scheduled a Jermaine Taylor fight against Showtime’s broadcast of the Castillo-Casamayor fight.  HBO is still the undisputed leader of boxing, but sometime their contracts with fighters have put them in compromising situations where they have to televise non-competitive matches, as is the case with Mayweather-Bruseles. I’m looking forward to that fight about as much as I am looking for to washing my dirty dishes.

Even though Showtime doesn’t have the sport’s biggest stars, they’ve been putting together some really good match ups.  I still love the way HBO packages the fights.  They make us feel like the fights are so important like the outcome in match ups will change global politics.  Their pre-fight intros, Larry Merchant’s expert commentary, and Jim Lampley’s impressive vocabulary make HBO boxing’s premiere network.