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Boxings TV Problem - Great Article!
It's been a few years now since Jay Larkin ran the boxing program at Showtime. When he left the network in November of 2005, it was on a high note, as he rode the crest of his 'Great fights, no rights' policy that ushered in an era for Showtime that showcased competitive fights, sans long-term commitments to individual fighters and their promoters, on the first Saturday of every month.
After having been away from the day-to-day operations of running a boxing program, he's had a chance to view things from afar. They say that time and distance can change perspectives you once had. Larkin, who still loves the sport, believes that in retrospect he may have been a prophet.
“If anything, my beliefs, my thinking, my theories, and my practices, which I've been hounding about for years, have either all come true or are being vindicated," he would tell Maxboxing. "I've always been a loud opponent of multi-fight deals and I've been a loud opponent to paying top dollar for fights you don't want, for accepting mandatories under the terms of a multi-fight deal. So we're seeing that was correct and that the way you ensure some continuity of quality is by not getting into that position and not letting the managers or promoters or even the fighters take control over what the network is paying for.
“At the end of the day, the network is paying the money and the network should really have the ability to say what fights they want and what fights they don't want."
Larkin is also against exclusive output deals with individual promoters. He should know, since Showtime had made a pact with Don King (some would say a deal with the devil) in order to ensure exclusivity with Mike Tyson. Meanwhile, they were stuck with one meaningless Fabrice Tiozzo fight after another for years. History has shown that, for the most part, dealing with just one entity to provide your boxing content damages the product and the overall brand. Rumors are running rampant that HBO and Golden Boy Promotions are in the process of cutting a deal where they are guaranteed a certain amount of dates and money for the next five years.
Larkin is squarely opposed to any agreements of that nature from a programming standpoint.
“I think it's a mistake to do that," he says flatly. "I think that in doing that you're risking the quality of the fights you're going to get. You're giving up a great deal of the quality control that you have. I think it's a mistake for anyone to do that. I lived through it and it was very difficult, through no choice of my own - of having a promoter who pretty much had carte blanche. When that happens, everyone is usually angry about it, except the promoter, who is the beneficiary."
You can debate what type of effect that the premium cable networks have had on the boxing business. On one hand, a few select fighters and their promoters have been enriched greatly. On the flip side, those same fighters who once fought on a regular basis now fight no more than two fights a year and don't enjoy true mainstream, crossover success.
And while there are about a dozen or so fighters who have benefited from this monetarily, it has killed the existence of the middle-class fighter who could carve out a decent living by staying busy. It has also turned a generation of promoters into nothing more than booking agents for the networks, who are akin to welfare recipients who receive their monthly welfare checks and blocks of cheese - in the form of license fees - to subsist.
The bottom line is there simply aren't enough real promoters anymore. The promoters in effect, at least in the United States, are HBO and Showtime, to a large degree. Because without the money they put up (which was the role of the promoter long ago) many of these events simply wouldn't take place. And the genesis of all this began as the over-the-air broadcast networks - which for so long had created true stars in the sport - left boxing all at once.
“You have to examine why they abandoned it," stated Larkin.
"They abandoned it originally for several reasons. Pretty much in the 70's and early 80's, they were the victim of buccaneering practices by some of the promoters. A lot of bait-and-switch. Buy one fight and get another. A lot of rigging of the rankings, which caused one of the networks to get caught in a terrible scandal. And that became legend and soured a lot of people at the network level. And the nature of some of the fighters getting into trouble was not what the networks wanted.
“And the most important reason that the networks abandoned boxing was illustrated by what Bob Arum said the other day at the Kelly Pavlik press conference. He told a story about how he got a phone call from a gentleman named Seth Abraham, whom he hadn't known prior to that. Seth told him he wanted to buy Bob's middleweight fights he was doing on ABC. And Bob told the crowd that his response was, 'Well, I have a deal with ABC and I have a relationship with them.' To which Seth responded, 'I'll give you four times what they're giving you at ABC.' "It didn't take Bob half-a-second to say, 'Good-bye ABC, hello HBO." And from there, it slowly became a different business. "Now, that moment is a very, very, very important moment in the history of boxing. Because that's the moment that the paradigm changed forever.
That's the moment when television networks took a step back and said, 'Wait a minute. When we've been in this business as long as there has been television and now we're learning if we build these fighters, we develop them, we take them in lesser quality fights, we're not going to get the big fights. The big fights are going to go to this thing called pay-TV.' So they lost their incentive to put these shows on, and taking that away, it just wasn't worth it to deal with all the aggravation. So they abandoned the sport. It was hard to get sponsors because sponsors didn't want to invest in a show that could last 30 seconds.
There was no guarantee of just how long a show would go." Bouts that were once priced in the range of $200,000 to $300,000 were now fetching seven-figures. Before license fees became welfare checks, they were lottery tickets. And everyone involved was lining up to get theirs.
"I don't blame HBO for carving out a franchise; they were a young network, they were looking for an audience and taking boxing onto pay-TV was a brilliant move and it became one of the foundations of premium television," says Larkin. "But it did so at the expense of the general health of the boxing industry." And now, about a quarter-of-a-century later, as the last staples that were built on ABC, CBS and NBC fade away, a vacuum exists. And a whole generation of fans has been lost as boxing biggest events are aired on the smallest platforms - premium cable and pay-per-view. It has also changed the way boxing is run. No longer are promoters concerned about selling tickets locally and building an attraction.
"Mostly, now the promoters’ formula is, in order: you call HBO, and if you can't make a deal there, call Showtime, and if you can't make a deal there you look at your pay-per-view possibilities and then you go down to your basic cable possibilities," states Larkin, who still dabbles in the boxing industry as a consultant for Frank Warren's Sports Network, which handles the careers of Joe Calzaghe and Amir Khan, among others.
"With each step down the ladder, the license fee decreases. Then you find a venue that's willing to give you a guarantee and then you take all your money, put it in a pot, go to the press conference and sit in the front row." Once fighters were paid according to how many seats they filled.
After having been away from the day-to-day operations of running a boxing program, he's had a chance to view things from afar. They say that time and distance can change perspectives you once had. Larkin, who still loves the sport, believes that in retrospect he may have been a prophet.
“If anything, my beliefs, my thinking, my theories, and my practices, which I've been hounding about for years, have either all come true or are being vindicated," he would tell Maxboxing. "I've always been a loud opponent of multi-fight deals and I've been a loud opponent to paying top dollar for fights you don't want, for accepting mandatories under the terms of a multi-fight deal. So we're seeing that was correct and that the way you ensure some continuity of quality is by not getting into that position and not letting the managers or promoters or even the fighters take control over what the network is paying for.
“At the end of the day, the network is paying the money and the network should really have the ability to say what fights they want and what fights they don't want."
Larkin is also against exclusive output deals with individual promoters. He should know, since Showtime had made a pact with Don King (some would say a deal with the devil) in order to ensure exclusivity with Mike Tyson. Meanwhile, they were stuck with one meaningless Fabrice Tiozzo fight after another for years. History has shown that, for the most part, dealing with just one entity to provide your boxing content damages the product and the overall brand. Rumors are running rampant that HBO and Golden Boy Promotions are in the process of cutting a deal where they are guaranteed a certain amount of dates and money for the next five years.
Larkin is squarely opposed to any agreements of that nature from a programming standpoint.
“I think it's a mistake to do that," he says flatly. "I think that in doing that you're risking the quality of the fights you're going to get. You're giving up a great deal of the quality control that you have. I think it's a mistake for anyone to do that. I lived through it and it was very difficult, through no choice of my own - of having a promoter who pretty much had carte blanche. When that happens, everyone is usually angry about it, except the promoter, who is the beneficiary."
You can debate what type of effect that the premium cable networks have had on the boxing business. On one hand, a few select fighters and their promoters have been enriched greatly. On the flip side, those same fighters who once fought on a regular basis now fight no more than two fights a year and don't enjoy true mainstream, crossover success.
And while there are about a dozen or so fighters who have benefited from this monetarily, it has killed the existence of the middle-class fighter who could carve out a decent living by staying busy. It has also turned a generation of promoters into nothing more than booking agents for the networks, who are akin to welfare recipients who receive their monthly welfare checks and blocks of cheese - in the form of license fees - to subsist.
The bottom line is there simply aren't enough real promoters anymore. The promoters in effect, at least in the United States, are HBO and Showtime, to a large degree. Because without the money they put up (which was the role of the promoter long ago) many of these events simply wouldn't take place. And the genesis of all this began as the over-the-air broadcast networks - which for so long had created true stars in the sport - left boxing all at once.
“You have to examine why they abandoned it," stated Larkin.
"They abandoned it originally for several reasons. Pretty much in the 70's and early 80's, they were the victim of buccaneering practices by some of the promoters. A lot of bait-and-switch. Buy one fight and get another. A lot of rigging of the rankings, which caused one of the networks to get caught in a terrible scandal. And that became legend and soured a lot of people at the network level. And the nature of some of the fighters getting into trouble was not what the networks wanted.
“And the most important reason that the networks abandoned boxing was illustrated by what Bob Arum said the other day at the Kelly Pavlik press conference. He told a story about how he got a phone call from a gentleman named Seth Abraham, whom he hadn't known prior to that. Seth told him he wanted to buy Bob's middleweight fights he was doing on ABC. And Bob told the crowd that his response was, 'Well, I have a deal with ABC and I have a relationship with them.' To which Seth responded, 'I'll give you four times what they're giving you at ABC.' "It didn't take Bob half-a-second to say, 'Good-bye ABC, hello HBO." And from there, it slowly became a different business. "Now, that moment is a very, very, very important moment in the history of boxing. Because that's the moment that the paradigm changed forever.
That's the moment when television networks took a step back and said, 'Wait a minute. When we've been in this business as long as there has been television and now we're learning if we build these fighters, we develop them, we take them in lesser quality fights, we're not going to get the big fights. The big fights are going to go to this thing called pay-TV.' So they lost their incentive to put these shows on, and taking that away, it just wasn't worth it to deal with all the aggravation. So they abandoned the sport. It was hard to get sponsors because sponsors didn't want to invest in a show that could last 30 seconds.
There was no guarantee of just how long a show would go." Bouts that were once priced in the range of $200,000 to $300,000 were now fetching seven-figures. Before license fees became welfare checks, they were lottery tickets. And everyone involved was lining up to get theirs.
"I don't blame HBO for carving out a franchise; they were a young network, they were looking for an audience and taking boxing onto pay-TV was a brilliant move and it became one of the foundations of premium television," says Larkin. "But it did so at the expense of the general health of the boxing industry." And now, about a quarter-of-a-century later, as the last staples that were built on ABC, CBS and NBC fade away, a vacuum exists. And a whole generation of fans has been lost as boxing biggest events are aired on the smallest platforms - premium cable and pay-per-view. It has also changed the way boxing is run. No longer are promoters concerned about selling tickets locally and building an attraction.
"Mostly, now the promoters’ formula is, in order: you call HBO, and if you can't make a deal there, call Showtime, and if you can't make a deal there you look at your pay-per-view possibilities and then you go down to your basic cable possibilities," states Larkin, who still dabbles in the boxing industry as a consultant for Frank Warren's Sports Network, which handles the careers of Joe Calzaghe and Amir Khan, among others.
"With each step down the ladder, the license fee decreases. Then you find a venue that's willing to give you a guarantee and then you take all your money, put it in a pot, go to the press conference and sit in the front row." Once fighters were paid according to how many seats they filled.