HBO Says It Is Leaving the Boxing Business

After 45 years, more than 1,000 fights and some of the most lucrative and controversial matches of all time, HBO is throwing in the towel on professional boxing. What started with a monumental upset seen by a relative handful of customers — George Foreman’s knockout of the heavyweight champion Joe Frazier in 1973 — will come to a close at the end of 2018. Currently, the network has no boxing broadcasts scheduled beyond a middleweight title fight at Madison Square Garden on Oct. 27. Peter Nelson, the 37-year-old executive vice president of HBO Sports, made the announcement that the new network was dropping boxing Thursday morning in a meeting with the HBO Boxing production staff, a group that includes the play-by-play announcer Jim Lampley, the analyst Max Kellerman, the ringside scorer Harold Lederman and the former boxing champions Andre Ward and Roy Jones Jr., who work for HBO as freelance commentators. Of the announcing staff, only Lampley is expected to remain with HBO. “This is not a subjective decision,” Nelson said in a recent interview. “Our audience research informs us that boxing is no longer a determinant factor for subscribing to HBO.” Such bouts sometimes attracted as much as one-third of HBO’s domestic subscriber base, which was roughly 15 million people at the time. Now, that base is roughly 40 million, but according to Nielsen, HBO boxing telecasts in 2018 averaged about 820,000 viewers, or about 2 percent of the total audience. The most widely-watched live bout on HBO of 2018, a middleweight title fight between Gennady Golovkin and Vanes Martirosyan, drew 1.3 million viewers. But a super-flyweight bout presented as an HBO main event on Sept. 8 peaked at 349,000 viewers, making it one of the lowest-rated boxing matches in HBO’s history. That decline in viewership, apparent for the past several years, was the final straw for Nelson. Boxing was no longer a profitable investment for HBO; last April’s Andre the Giant documentary, for example, drew about seven million viewers at a much lower cost than the $1.5 million to $3 million generally required to produce a boxing match. “Because of our association with boxing, people forget that we’re not a sports network,” Nelson said. “We’re a storytelling platform.” Some episodes of “Game of Thrones” garner audiences in the tens of millions. And HBO Sports has high expectations for “The Shop,” a recently-launched talk show set in a barbershop produced by and starring LeBron James. HBO’s only association with boxing in 2019 will be a two-part documentary on Muhammad Ali, with James serving as the executive producer. Still, the prospect that HBO would soon be out of the boxing business seemed unthinkable to some industry insiders. “As someone who helped contribute to building their boxing legacy, it would be heartbreaking to me,” said Lou DiBella, an HBO vice president during the network’s boxing heyday and now a promoter. Nelson left the door open for a possible return to the ring one day after the network’s final scheduled bout next month: a middleweight fight between Brooklyn’s Daniel Jacobs and Sergiy Derevyanchenko. A heavyweight showdown between Joshua and Deontay Wilder, for example, might tempt HBO, he acknowledged, if only for one night. “I’m still a fan of boxing,” Nelson said. “If there is a destination event, absolutely we’re in that conversation.” https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/27/sports/hbo-boxing.html