By Keith Idec
LOS ANGELES – Stephen Espinoza understands the concern among some of even boxing’s most hardcore fans to pay $75 on Saturday night to watch the Deontay Wilder-Tyson Fury fight.
Ideally, even the biggest, best bouts Espinoza is involved in making would air live on Showtime. That’s not economically realistic, though, definitely not when huge heavyweights put their perfect records and an eventual lucrative shot at British superstar Anthony Joshua at risk.
Simply put, Wilder and Fury wouldn’t fight Saturday night if their 12-round battle for Wilder’s WBC heavyweight title wasn’t televised via pay-per-view. Their guaranteed purses for their main event at Staples Center in Los Angeles are well beyond what even the highest Showtime license fee of the year could accommodate.
“Our preference, as a premium network, is to program on the network,” said Espinoza, Showtime’s president of sports and event programming. “That’s how we get subscribers and keep subscribers happy. But once in a while, there comes an event that can’t be financed through a license fee. Between the production costs and the needs of the fighters and what it would take to get this, a license fee would be three, four, five times what a maximum license fee is in order to make this happen.
“So really, it couldn’t happen. These guys aren’t gonna fight for a top-tier license fee. They’re not gonna divide up $3, $4 or $5 million. They’re both making nearly that already [apiece]. So at this point, and I commend them, they’re sort of eating what they kill. If they don’t market well and go out and pound the pavement, and kiss babies and shake hands, then, you know, their purse is gonna reflect it [based on pay-per-view buys]. And if they do that well, then the purse will reflect that as well.”
Wilder and Fury each will earn a percentage of pay-per-view revenue from their fight, in addition to their guaranteed purses.
Wilder-Fury will headline the first of three pay-per-view boxing cards over the next 3½ months.
Two of those shows, Wilder-Fury and Manny Pacquiao-Adrien Broner on January 19 in Las Vegas, will be distributed by Showtime. The third such event, Errol Spence Jr.-Mikey Garcia on March 16 in Arlington, Texas, will be distributed by FOX.
The four-fight Wilder-Fury telecast costs $74.99 to view in HD in the United States and £19.95 to watch in HD through BT Sport Box Office in the United Kingdom. In addition to buying the fight traditionally through cable and satellite operators, Wilder-Fury can purchased through the Showtime app, which allows for streaming on laptops, phones and tablets.
The 33-year-old Wilder (40-0, 39 KOs), of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, is consistently listed as just a slight favorite over the 30-year-old Fury (27-0, 19 KOs), of Manchester, England.
Keith Idec is a senior writer/columnist for BoxingScene.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing.
