Billy’s Boxing Blog

By William Trillo
Photo-Chop: Bret “The Threat”

When the Manny Pacquiao vs. Shane Mosley fight was made official, 99.9% of the boxing writers turned their noses up and called this fight a real stinker. No one disagreed. The last thing anyone wanted to see was the Congressman take on an aging fighter who hasn’t won a fight in over 2 years.

Be that as it may, after the announcement that Bob Arum had jumped ship and taken this fight from HBO to the waiting arms of CBS/Showtime, suddenly the same media that first snubbed the fight were now calling this the greatest idea since “One-Hour Martinizing”.

Really?

Has anyone stopped to consider that maybe the reason HBO wasn’t so hot to secure this fight in the first place is because they were as apprehensive about this fight as most of the so called “experts”, and in their apprehension they allowed this one to slip away?

Now…letting Manny Pacquiao go over to the enemy is a huge roll of the dice by HBO, I will not deny that. But at the same time, one has to wonder if there can’t be a method to their madness, whether it, (the madness), was thrust upon them or not.

Allow me to explain, HBO receives nothing from PPV sales, in fact, they have to pay pay a license fee. The only benefit comes to Time-Warner, the parent company, which gets 50 per cent off the top, like all cable carriers of the total gross on PPV.  Let me say that again, HBO pays for the right to broadcast PPV’s. I think they see Pacquiao vs. Mosley as another uncompetitive beat down and the cost of producing it could be sky high…so why do it?

Now that Arum has jumped ship and taken his top selling product elsewhere, I’d like to see HBO start making some smart moves and put the money saved into good WCB and BAD fights, wouldn’t you? If boxing is going to truly make it’s resurgence in 2011 it will need to put more quality fights on free broadcasts and spare us the Mosley vs. Mora type PPV’s we had shoved down our throats in 2010. This weekends Holyfield vs. Williams atrocity is a perfect example of why the PPV madness must come to an immediate and grinding halt. Boxing fans are tired of being ripped off and hopefully this surprising move by Arum will open HBO’s eyes and help them and/or force them to go in a new fan friendly direction.

Something else HBO may be considering is this, Pacquiao has all but run out of viable opponents for big fights and Showtime is buying in at the tail end. The only truly big name left out there is Floyd, and I don’t really ever see that one happening, and if it did, you can be sure that Team Mayweather (Golden Boy & Al Haymon) won’t bite the hand that feeds them (HBO), not if they have a say where the fight ends up getting broadcast.

Truth be told, fans are starting to get tired of paying big bucks to see Manny beat up on old men and shot fighters and quite frankly in the eyes of many, Mosley falls under both categories, old & shot.

Also keep this in mind, HBO can offer purses roughly double of what Showtime can put up. Because of this, Showtime can never compete with HBO for WCB fights, and Shobox with BAD. So Arum can go PPV all he wants with SHOWTIME, but when it comes down to regular fights, (the networks Bread & Butter), it’s most likely he will strongly consider going back to HBO. And as I said earlier, it’s those regular fights that are going to bring the disgruntled fans back to boxing.  PPV events like Manny vs. Shane present the very likely possibility of keeping the fans grumbling.

Events like that should keep the media grumbling as well, or at least express a little concern, but they have bigger concerns on their minds, like hanging a press credential around their necks, so it’s more than likely they will find a way to stroke the promoters and networks rather than tell things like they are.

With that said this move by Arum may be exactly the shot in the arm boxing, (and HBO), has needed for a few years now. It’s often said that necessity is the mother of invention. Similarly, it can be said that competition is the mother of innovation.

By taking boxing’s # 1 attraction Manny Pacquiao over to the enemy at Showtime Arum has forced HBO to rethink and hopefully retool what they have been doing, (and not doing), and the end result should and could be just what the Doctor has ordered for an anemic boxing community.

Check out www.Pound4Pound.com for all the lates boxing news.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 24th, 2011 at 8:54 am and is filed under Boxing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.