“Fighting Words” - Haymon and Bettering “The Contender”
by David P. Greisman
It was March 2005. Boxing was returning to primetime television on NBC in the form of a buzzed-about reality competition called “The Contender” helmed by a highly successful executive producer in Mark Burnett. Hall of Fame boxer Sugar Ray Leonard had an on-air presence to help lend credibility and star power to the series.
It is 10 years later, and boxing is set to return to primetime television on NBC this March in the form of a buzzed-about series called “Premiere Boxing Champions” that is being put together by highly successful boxing adviser Al Haymon. Sugar Ray Leonard will once again be an on-air presence.
The parallels pretty much end there, but it’s interesting to think back to what “The Contender” sought to be, what “Premiere Boxing Champions” will not be, and how the minds behind “PBC” will hopefully strive for it to be and do far better than “The Contender” did a decade ago.
“The Contender” debuted with 8.1 million viewers, had 8.9 million viewers for its next airing and 6.7 million for its third. On average, the show pulled in an estimated 6.2 million people for its first season and 7.97 million for the live finale. These would be amazing numbers when compared to boxing’s traditional audience — given that HBO and Showtime celebrate when its shows do 1.2 million viewers — but back in 2005 and on America’s major broadcast networks, these numbers weren’t good enough for NBC to renew fit. Seasons 2 and 3 were on ESPN. Season 4 was on Versus, which is now NBC Sports Network.
It’s highly unlikely that PBC’s ratings will approach those of “The Contender.” The television audience is even more fragmented now than it was then. More people are unplugging and turning to other forms of technology for their entertainment. PBC doesn’t have the time slot “The Contender” did. It won’t have the network’s marketing muscle behind it.
It also won’t have the same expectations.
Haymon has purchased the time slots on NBC, NBC Sports Network, Spike TV and reportedly may be doing the same on BET, CBS Sports Network and perhaps ESPN as well. He will still need good enough ratings to attract money from advertisers and sponsors, but he won’t need to be as concerned with pleasing network executives.
He’ll also be able to use these numerous network platforms and a strategic marketing campaign to create more awareness of all of these different shows on different stations.
He’ll have higher quality fighters, too.
The first four seasons of “The Contender” produced five boxers who would go on to hold world titles. None of them could claim to be among the best in his respective division.
Sergio Mora, who won the first season, went on to top Vernon Forrest by majority decision in 2008 to pick up a belt at 154 pounds. Forrest won the rematch three months later.
Cornelius Bundrage, who was on the second season, stopped Cory Spinks in 2010 to win a belt at 154 pounds. He had one successful defense in 2011 and another in 2012 before losing to Ishe Smith in 2013.
Smith, who was also on the first season, subsequently lost the belt seven months later in his first defense, against Carlos Molina.
Sakio Bika, who won the third season, went on to win a vacant title at 168 pounds in 2013 with a majority decision over Marco Antonio Periban. He defended it later that year with a draw against Anthony Dirrell before losing to Dirrell in a rematch in 2014.
Sam Soliman, who was also in the third season, took a decision over Felix Sturm to win a world title at 160 pounds last year, losing just four months later to Jermain Taylor.
The fighters taking part in the first PBC shows will actually be performing in front of presumably larger audiences than they ever have before. Many nevertheless are more notable than the titleholders who came out of “The Contender,” including Andre Berto, Adrien Broner, Danny Garcia, Robert Guerrero, Lamont Peterson, Peter Quillin, Keith Thurman, with all but Thurman being current or former titleholders (Thurman is the WBA’s “regular” titleholder at 147, while Floyd Mayweather is the sanctioning body’s true titleholder.
They can bring more credibility than the “Contender” contestants, who largely (though not exclusively) were seen at the time as prospects, has-beens or never-weres. That could then help these PBC fighters build a greater fan following than had been available to them before.
There also won’t be the frustratingly edited bouts with movie-like sound effects that made up “The Contender.”
The quality of the fights doesn’t necessarily translate into the quantity of viewers, however. And that’s why marketing will be so important. Haymon, who has made a killing off leveraging television networks and promoters in the past, now needs his team to put in legwork on behalf of growing his fighters.
Mora, who signed with Haymon last year, told me in an interview back then of a social media team that had been assigned to him.
One longtime fight scribe has been hired to work for Haymon’s efforts, and another experienced and well-connected boxing reporter is rumored to have joined the PBC team. The PBC page on Facebook was up to more than 9,500 likes as of early this morning, while the Twitter account had more than 4,700 followers, numbers that aren’t tremendous but will continue to grow.
The news section of the PBC website has a few articles a day. And every once in a while there is an article designed in the hopes of going viral, with Buzzfeed-like headlines such as “Top 7 moments Angel and Danny Garcia won best father-son duo.”
Last week, Broner appeared on the MTV2 show “Wild ‘N Out” hosted by Nick Cannon.
Boxing, and not just PBC, should strive to attract the attention of casual fans, make new fans, and keep them around for more than just the two or three biggest pay-per-views of the year.
“These guys fighting in these fights on NBC, they're in for a rude awakening," Mora told Kevin Iole of Yahoo! Sports last week. “They think they were Mr. HBO and Mr. Showtime, whatever, and people knew them, but let me tell you this: They're going to go into a completely new stratosphere. They’ll be recognized everywhere they go. It’s not just the hard-core fight fans. It’s going to be moms and pops and grandparents and kids, everybody. They’re going to have their eyes opened and they’ll recognize the power of TV.”
But first that audience has to show up, and then it has to stay. It doesn’t matter what “The Contender” did or didn’t do a decade ago. What matters is what PBC begins to do next month.
The 10 Count
1. The fact that Don King lost a lawsuit and owes seven figures in damages due to one of his fighters testing positive for a banned substance is an interesting story.
The quick background: A rematch between cruiserweights Denis Lebedev and Guillermo Jones was called off the day of their April 2014 bout due to Jones popping positive for furosemide, a banned diuretic and potential masking substance for which he had also tested positive with his stoppage of Lebedev in May 2013.
The fight’s promoter sued King and won, and last week it was announced that King would have to give up his claim to a $550,000 payment that had been placed in escrow prior to the bout and would also need to pay out about $1.6 million for the cost of staging and promoting the bout.
Now that a boxing promoter has been held financially responsible for the actions of his fighter, will that lead to more promoters doing more stringent drug testing on their own boxers and changing the contracts to hold the fighters financially liable — or will promoters see this as a chilling case and add it as yet another reason for them not to do more stringent testing than the lax testing presently in place?
I have a feeling it’ll be the latter. That has been the status quo for far too long. And there continue to be too many excuses for this being so.
2. An update:
Last week I pondered there potentially being three shows in New York City in a six-week span, given the already announced April 25 card featuring Wladimir Klitschko vs. Bryant Jennings at Madison Square Garden, the likelihood that the April 11 bout between Danny Garcia and Lamont Peterson wound wind up at Barclays Center, and the potential for a March 21 doubleheader involving Terence Crawford and Nicholas Walters in separate bouts in The Theater at Madison Square Garden.
So much for that.
First there came news that Walters had come down with the flu and would not be appearing on the March 21 card.
Then came the report that the proposed show would not be happening at all, given that Crawford still didn’t have an opponent officially signed on for his next bout.
3. Boxers Behaving Goodly: Boyd Melson — a New York-based middleweight who is 14-1-1 — is said to donate everything he earns from boxing toward looking for a cure to spinal cord injuries. He’s announced the “Pushups for Paralysis Challenge,” seeking to follow-up on the wildly successful “Ice Bucket Challenge” that raised a massive amount of donations toward ALS research.
And last week, Edgar Brito — a 3-0-1 junior featherweight out of Phoenix — said that he would donate a portion of his purse for his Feb. 28 bout to the Wounded Warrior Project, which helps injured members of the American military. Iron Boy Promotions has promised to match Brito’s donation.
4. Boxers Behaving Badly update: Nathan Decastro, a 23-year-old super middleweight from the United Kingdom, had an assault case against him dismissed after the woman who had accused Decastro of striking her was a no-show in court. That left prosecutors without evidence to proceed, according to the Lincolnshire Echo.
“The court heard that she had been untraceable and that her own mother did not know her whereabouts,” the report said. “Police had been unable to locate her.”
The alleged incident dated back to July. The case was dismissed late last month.
Decastro turned pro in March 2014, fighting three times last year and going 3-0 with 1 KO. BoxRec listed him last week as being scheduled to fight this past Friday, but there were no results from that card listed online as of Sunday evening.
5. So, Peter Quillin vacated his middleweight title last year rather than face mandatory contender Matt Korobov and receive a career-high payday in the process.
Korobov fought Andy Lee instead, and Lee won the vacant belt via knockout.
And now Quillin, not having done anything since then despite promising that bigger things were coming, will be challenging Lee on April 11.
Quillin received a lot of grief back then. He would’ve received far less had he just said from the outset what we all knew was the case — that he dropped the belt because Jay-Z’s Roc Nation Sports had won the rights to promote Quillin-Korobov, and that his adviser, Al Haymon, didn’t want any of his guys to work with the fledgling boxing promoter.
The layoff and the decision likely won’t end up hurting Quillin too much. There were rumors that he’d received some money from Haymon for turning down the Korobov bout. He got some time off with his newborn child. And now he’s fighting for his old title.
6. Jermain Taylor’s second run with a middleweight world title lasted a little less than four months. Last week, the International Boxing Federation stripped Taylor of the belt due to him being locked up while awaiting court dates.
The IBF cited this rule:
“Any boxer who is ill, injured, under a legal impediment which would prevent the bout from taking place, or on suspension at the time the championships chairman and president order a bout under this rule shall be considered unavailable.”
In essence, Taylor was still eligible to fight for the world title last October despite having allegedly shot his cousin. He was still eligible to defend it this February while his trial in that case was months away. And he may very well still have been eligible to defend the title after the second alleged gun incident, this one occurring in January, had he not wound up in jail and ordered held for a mental evaluation.
I’d like to think that sanctioning bodies and athletic commissions wouldn’t let that be the case. Except the tendency has long been not to turn down an opportunity to make money off of fighters, even if the morally proper thing is not to let a fight take place while the legal process works out — and to set standards for legal behavior by not licensing those who’ve been convicted of certain crimes.
7. Kind of like how the country of Australia turned down a visit from Floyd Mayweather Jr., who was scheduled to appear at a number of events. Mayweather’s past convictions for domestic abuse were reportedly the reason.
Meanwhile, boxing’s powers-that-be care far too little thanks to the money Mayweather brings in.
Think about the pressure that there was on the NFL during the Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson cases last season.
And then recall that Mayweather had already pleaded guilty and had gotten his jail time pushed back in 2012 so that HBO and the state of Nevada could host his pay-per-view main event with Miguel Cotto.
Then again, there’s a culture in sports of allowing athletes to get away with things. The allegations brought up in a New York Times investigation into Florida State University were just one example. And some boxing fans would put out the argument that we’re not asking fighters to be saints. Boxers don’t have teammates to let down. There aren’t huge sponsors who worry about loud public pressure or boycotts. They appear two to three times a year and commit sanctioned acts of violence.
(And for what it’s worth, other entertainment industries have their shares of performers who have faced allegations or been convicted.)
8. Eric Raskin had an interesting piece about five years ago called “Can fans root for rulebreakers?” I was among those quoted within. The article can be found at http://bit.ly/raskinrulebreakers
9. How times change. Australia, founded as a penal colony, now won’t allow Floyd Mayweather Jr. to visit.
10. Some of the conversations I’ve had with boxing fans have touched on how difficult it can be to find a romantic partner who is willing to watch the fights with them.
I can report that I had no success finding a flame to watch last week’s “Friday Night Fights” broadcast featuring middleweight Sergio Mora vs. late replacement Abraham Han.
That likely had less to do with Mora and more to do with the way I asked:
“So, do you wanna see the Latin Snake in action tonight?”
CompuSlap reported a 100 percent connect rate…
“Fighting Words” appears every Monday on BoxingScene.com. Pick up a copy of David’s book, “Fighting Words: The Heart and Heartbreak of Boxing,” at http://bit.ly/fightingwordsamazon or internationally at http://bit.ly/fightingwordsworldwide . Send questions/comments via email at fightingwords1@gmail.com
