By Steve Kim

This weekend from the Microsoft Theater at LA Live ESPN is televising the WBO super featherweight bout between Vasyl Lomachenko against Miguel Marriaga. Then on August 19th they are broadcasting the contest between Terence Crawford and Julius Indongo for all the junior welterweight belts.

It's part of the new partnership between the network and Top Rank, which recently made the decision to take their clients of cable premium networks (namely HBO) and onto ESPN. The overall concept was about exposing the sport to a much broader audience.

"What the public thinks of the fighters, that's the most important thing," said the president of Top Rank, Todd duBoef, who was the engineer of this new deal.

"Making the Lomacheko's, the (Ray)Beltran's, the Crawford's, the Idongo's and the (Oleksandr) Gvozdyk's household names. That's what I need the public to buy into. I want them to say, 'Holy Moses, I just saw this wonderful feature on this kid fighting for his green card (Beltran)' or 'this guy came from the Ukraine, I've never seen anyone move like that, his training tactics or the mental things,' that we captured in 'Camp Life'( a web series produced by Top Rank). So that's what we need the public to see."

By going from an HBO to an ESPN, they go from a universe of around 25 million subscribers to over 90 million. In addition to all the added platforms and coverage that ESPN can provide.

duBoef explained - "All it was is re-positioning the sport, that's all it was. And it was a simple shift. It wasn't just moving networks because for sports to be successful, a product to be successful it has to have a '360 perspective'. It has to have the before's, the during's and the after - be on all the time."

In other words the sport has to be discussed even during the periods when there isn't an actual event.

"Now the NFL has the NFL Network, NBA-TV is run by Turner and the NHL has their stuff," said duBoef, pointing out some examples of how other sports are covered extensively throughout the year.

"Those are wonderful mechanisms to keep the fans activated all the time."

There will be a fall schedule which will be announced soon.

"Absolutely," said duBoef. 'There's a lot of stuff that's going to be going on for the whole product on the boxing platform (on ESPN) but it's not for me to speak out about it at this point."

Steve Kim is the news editor for BoxingScene.com.