By Carlos Boogs
Top Rank's CEO Bob Arum had a long-running feud with manager/adviser Al Haymon.
Earlier this year, the two of them settled their differences and their legal battle. Arum has sued Haymon over his Premier Boxing Champions business model, claiming the powerful businessman was attempting to create a monopoly.
Haymon was able to raise a large amount of money and then used those funds to secure exclusive time-buy agreements with several television outlets like Fox/Fox Sports 1, ESPN/ABC, Spike TV, Bounce TV, CBS/CBS Sports and NBC/NBC Sports.
Once they settled the lawsuit, Arum and Haymon became friendly and are now open to the possibility of doing business together.
Arum respects Haymon and believes that he's a very smart businessman, but also feels that his PBC business model was poorly run and led to an extreme loss of money.
"Al Haymon is a misunderstood guy. He's a very, very clever. Somehow he got these mutual funds in Kansas to come up with $500 million dollars, most of which he's pissed away. He really pissed it away," Arum told The Forward Podcast.
"His idea was to come in with a lot of money, and that's a lot of money, and make deals with all the networks, exclusive deals, to cut out all of the other promoters.. put his product on and pay the networks for the time and then pay the fighters. It was something that made no sense."
"The idea would be that he would run everybody else out of business and then he could charge the networks what he wanted. But it was run so poorly, the ratings were so bad, that he's never going to be able to go the networks and get paid for the product. That's really hurting us, because we have a good product and then when we go to a network [and they don't want to buy the product]."
