Kathy Duva questions the Haymon Boxing Model (good read)

[icha]

I heard rumor,so don't quote me on this. The rumor was that haymon was giving mgm grand employees,discount s on tickets,and along with those discounts,came free tickets in order to make it appear as if they had a much larger audience. Do you know if this is true?

this is from another forum:
"I do alot of drum gigs at the MGM and my homegirl hits me up and says "Buck I know you love Boxing, you want some free tickets to the fight saturday" I say of course!! Then i was messing around and said "Can I get 20" she says "how about 25"!!! "Also dress nice because your most likely will be in the first 10 rows!!"

YES SIR!! its great to live in Las vegas and great to be known around town! if anybody in this fourm lives in Vegas (I think im the only one I seen in 7 years) then message me and I have a ticket for you!"

[Barcham]

99% of the ad's were for boxing. I didn't see many outside sponsors at all. Al didn't sell much in the way of advertising for round one of his great plan.

From what I could tell, they had only two sponsors, Corona beer and hotels.com. All the other ads for promos for upcoming boxing shows or local station ads. As far as the ratings go, they were decent for a Saturday night but nothing fantastic. To make a profit he would need to charge extremely high advertising rates and to charge those rates he would need ratings that are only seen during the week in prime time on shows like Big **** Theory and such. He will never his those ratings on a Saturday night. No show in the history of television ever has.

[radioraheem]

I didn't like anything from the debut show other than the Thurman/Guerrero fight.

I'm of the opinion that boxing cannot be fixed and grow by this want to be on network TV. I do not see the viewership rising over the initial show and that will most likely mean sponsors will not come calling. I believe boxing needs to be rebuilt from the ground up, in local communities and even in schools. Building popularity at the local community level, making it a community staple with small time shows and events will cause the sport to become more mainstream and will at that point, grow the viewership and attract sponsors at the top end.

Your idea is an interesting one, but is much more time consuming and much more expensive. Funding boxing in the local communities costs money, lots of free money. There's no ROI either. And this development takes more than a decade to see results from.

Secondly, there's the argument that popularity tends to spring from what's going on in mainstream America, nationally. So a lot of people participate in basketball because it's all over TV. Football, because it's all over TV. Baseball, because it's... you see the pattern. The sports that's not seen all over TV have the least participants locally all across America.

[Mitchell Kane]

A member on another board I post on was given 25 free tickets by someone who knows who was working the venue that night. I think they gave a lot of free tickets and still only managed to fill half the arena.

Dan Rafael said in his chat the sales were sluggish, Steve Kim wrote on twitter that they were giving tickets away and also selling discounted tickets...and then I think he had some tweet showing the PBC facebook account giving away free tickets to people who simply facebook messaged them asking them for tickets.

[The Big Dunn]

Bewlsshiiit. Lack of money has never stopped a fight from getting made. A lack of balls does. There are quality fights every year. When quality fights don't happen, it's because one guy makes an excuse to not fight the other. We seen fFloyd do this. Now we see quillin, leo, and others do it. And it's not because of a lack of funding.

You couldn't be more wrong. Quality fights do not happen because the networks pay for and put on bad fights. They do this because in the PPV era they've found that superstars and not quality fights are what sell ppv's. No promoter/manager/fighter forces any network to put them on.

So, for example, they will bankroll GGG fights against bum after bum because they get good ratings for little money, and wait until he can make a ppv fight rather than force him and ward or Canelo to fight because of the risks involved in losing.

They want 2 attractions who keep winning and tease a fight to keep you interested.

It seems that you don't want more boxing programming available solely because Haymon is doing it/the one who is making it happen. why is that?

[Da Machine]

Why are you guys so concerned about comp tickets. This had been standard procedure on many cards for years now.

It seems like people still aren't getting and simply probably just won't ever get it. Haymons goal isn't too make money right now. He's in the investment stage of whatever goals he has. Is really not hard to understand yet people keep mentioning how he isnt making money in the first card. Well no ****. He probably won't make money on many cards if any in these two years.

[North Star]

Your idea is an interesting one, but is much more time consuming and much more expensive. Funding boxing in the local communities costs money, lots of free money. There's no ROI either. And this development takes more than a decade to see results from.

Secondly, there's the argument that popularity tends to spring from what's going on in mainstream America, nationally. So a lot of people participate in basketball because it's all over TV. Football, because it's all over TV. Baseball, because it's... you see the pattern. The sports that's not seen all over TV have the least participants locally all across America.

These things were popular and mainstream before the invention of TV.

The idea is that you aren't going to convert any non-boxing people into boxing fans. Most boxing fans grew up with the sport in their household in some form or another. The reason why football, basketball, baseball, hockey, soccer/futbol, etc. are so popular, is because it is nourished at the lowest levels of the sport. There should be no reason to neglect the point of view that a great youth program is necessary for future growth.

Fixing boxing should be a long term investment to attain a mainstream goal. There is no quick fix. When the big time folks finally realize that, it will change.

[SkillspayBills]

One thing that's alarming to me are the extraordinarily large purses fighters are getting to fight sparring partners/overmatched opposition.

Mares, Leo Santa Cruz, S. Porter, Danny Garcia, Peterson, Etc.. etc.. have all been paid extremely well to face mediocre opposition recently. Like the article said, how much would it cost to actually attempt to put together a good fight in the future, seeing as how fighters will be demanding ballooned numbers? If PBC has to cut back on purses, how would the fighters take paycuts after being showered with cash? Not only fighters in the PBC but fighters across the sport might begin to demand higher figures and in turn some fights might never come into fruition on the other networks unwilling to shell out the cash demanded. It's a sticky situation :T

I said it plenty of times before, the PBC has the sport of boxing on its shoulders right about now, hope it succeeds or else everyone will pay the price.

I completely agree with this point. The fact Santa cruz got paid 750K to LITERALLY fight someone he spars with shocked me. That is completely overpaying a fighter and it is a dangerous precedent. Look at him asking for 3 mil for Rigo. This guy's worth is much less than he thinks it is.

[brettWall]

I would copy and paste it but it's too long but for those interested here is the link:

http://bleacherreport.com/articles/2...ns-sustainable


To work the plan needs to attract sponsors, without sponsorship it's likely to fail and sponsors don't usually want to touch boxing.

Duva says boxing has an image problem with regard to sponsors which would explain why Haymon has cut the seedy entourages, questionable entrance music, got rid of the ring girls, no corner talk and cut short Broner's interviews.

Haymon seems intent on cleaning up the sport's image to sell it to the masses so that big sponsors will come in.

I still think they could have entrance songs, but just normal songs, doesn't have to be gangsta rap.

I still don't get why WWE/WWF get away with it. I know it's scripted but what's the difference?

[Dr Rumack]

Haymon should have used the money he spent on Hans Zimmer to find himself a decent matchmaker. It's the one aspect of the sport in which he's miles behind, and it's probably the most important capability a promoter can have. Finding opponents who people that know the sport won't laugh at, and yet also won't be good enough to actually beat your guy is the key. Haymon still hasn't figured that out. You look at Broner and he's following the same path as Berto, just half a decade later.