By Steve Kim
The Top Rank/ESPN series has been on a strong run of late and that continued this weekend with the entertaining slugfest between Jose Ramirez and Amir Imam, who went 12 hard fought rounds with Ramirez coming away with the vacant WBC 140-pound title.
This comes on the heels of the solid bout between Ray Beltran and Paulus Moses and last weeks bloody contest that featured WBO featherweight titlist Oscar Valdez and challenger Scott Quigg.
Bob Arum, the head of Top Rank, explained to BoxingScene.com - "With ESPN we have a tremendous advantage because we have dates. So when you have dates you can plan for fights. It's not like going to a premium network and begging for dates and you're really tied to their schedule. With ESPN and particularly with the new series we have more than two a month now and its going up."
What Arum is referencing is the new ESPN streaming app that will distribute the Jeff Horn-Terence Crawford fight, which has moved off it's original April 14th date.
"Everybody at ESPN loves what we're doing, as the development at the end of the last week showed when the head of ESPN talked about ESPN+ and boxing. So we're going to really show boxing like it's never been shown before," continued Arum, who harps on his boxers getting consistent activity.
"To keep people's interest you have to make competitive fights but you also got to have continuity. You can't have guys fight just one or even twice a year. You've got to have them fight three and even four times a year and we'll be able to do that."
As for the upcoming months, Arum says that alongside ESPN they will have, "a huge summer, we probably will be going in June, July and August at least three shows a month."
He explained - "We wont be going as often during the fall during football season but again this is the time when baseball just has the long season, basketball is pretty well finished and so you can now show boxing as a major sport on ESPN."
Steve Kim is the news editor for BoxingScene.com.
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