Top Rank President Todd duBoef looks at it as an opportunity, empowerment. A free pass perhaps.
Those are a few of the positives duBoef lists for his company coming out of HBO?s rejection of the pay-per-view broadcast for the Nov. 5 return of Manny Pacquiao at the Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas.
HBO explained that the Pacquiao card fell too close to its Nov. 19 pay-per-view blockbuster between Sergey Kovalev and Andre Ward at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas.
Therefore, Top Rank will produce and distribute its own pay-per-view of a card that consists of three title fights. DuBoef scoffs at the notion that the venerable boxing promotional company was left with no other choice but to do it themselves.
?I disagree with that,? duBoef said. ?Actually, we?re left with many choices and many different options. But at the end of the day, after we thought about it, you say, ?Listen, I do the distribution deals myself, usually. HBO or Showtime or whoever, may come to me and say, ?what do you think about this deal?? That?s one thing they do. I basically get a marketing agent that does our marketing. HBO does the production, but we have done the production, too, like we did in (Macau).
?When you work out the math, it?s like, ?wait a second, I?ll just do all of these things myself, do it with all of our talented people and see if there?s stuff from different mechanisms off of these platforms to go ahead and create awareness.?
Creating awareness for this high-powered card should be one of the easier tasks facing Top Rank. Pacquiao, 37, returning to the ring for the first time since he retired after defeating Timothy Bradley on April 9, may not be the superstar he once was, but he?s still a future Hall of Famer, an eight-division world champion and one of the most popular fighters in the world. He will fight for the WBO welterweight belt that twice was his but is now held by his opponent, Jessie Vargas.
Also on the card, Nonito Donaire (37-3, 24 KOs), a four-division titlist, defends his WBO super bantamweight belt against undefeated Jessie Magdaleno. It will mark the first time that Donaire and Pacquiao, the two greatest Filipino fighters, appear on the same card together. And undefeated WBO featherweight champion and rising star Oscar Valdez (20-0, 18 KOs), a two-time Olympian from Mexico, will face No. 1 contender Hiroshige Osawa (30-3-4, 19 KOs), from Osaka, Japan.
Recently added is a 12-round flyweight rematch between two-time Chinese Olympic gold medalist Zou Shiming (8-1, 2 KOs) and Kwanpichit Onesongchaigym (39-1-2, 24 KOs), also known as Prasitsak Papoem, of Thailand. They fought in 2014 in Macau, a fight Zou won by unanimous decision in a world title eliminator. The loss was the Thai fighter?s first and he has gone 12-0 (12 KOs) since. Zou is rated No. 2 and Kwanpichit No. 3 by the WBO.
Three title fights and a top-notch rematch, despite what some perceive as a mismatch in the main event, should not be a terribly tough sell.
The question of whether Vargas has the clout, the skills and the charisma and personality to sell this fight, and whether he deserves to be in the same ring with Pacquiao will soon be answered. But duBoef believes Vargas is greatly underrated and will prove it between now and Nov. 5.
?He?s very charismatic, he?s wonderfully spoken, he?s done a wonderful job promoting himself,? duBoef said. ?You ask Tim Bradley about that 12th round (when Vargas had Bradley badly hurt but lost the last 10 crucial seconds of the final round due to the referee?s error). Manny Pacquiao never had Tim Bradley like that. And then to follow it up with (a TKO against undefeated) Sadam Ali, and everybody mailed it in that he was just the opponent. So my feeling is, you just remind people of those performances, and performances sell fights.?
The last time Top Rank produced and distributed a live PPV was on Feb. 21, 2009. It was a split-site PPV telecast from Madison Square Garden and Youngstown, Ohio, featuring Miguel Cotto vs. Michael Jennings and Kelly Pavlik vs. Marco Antonio Rubio. Both were world title fights.
What will be missing this time without HBO?s participation will be the shoulder programming, such as Faceoff and 24/7. But duBoef relishes the opportunity allow the veteran Top Rank staff to get creative.
?There?s other platforms, there?s other people, there?s other individuals that are very interested in running with really good shoulder programming that would help drive awareness,? duBoef said, without being specific. ?And there?s things that we want to look at outside the box.
?So I look at it like a free pass. This is like a great opportunity for all of us, and it?s been very empowering for our staff, which is largely a very talented staff that wants to be creative and go ahead and move with this.?
In pay-per-view shows, duBoef says, the network really pays for nothing, except for production costs. They don?t pay the purses. DuBoef said this PPV will be no different for the consumer. It will still be on a pay-per-view channel. They will still have digital distribution, which means you can get the fight on your laptop or phone through Toprank.tv.
?Nothing will be different except that we will do different, unique types of marketing tactics, and create awareness,? DuBoef said. ?Perception was that HBO had a very active role in pay-per-view. The reality of it is, they had no money at risk, for the most part. They did the production, which was brilliant and always very well done. They would give us real estate on their platforms leading up to the fight. 24-7 or Faceoff types of shows. But at the end of the day, what were they doing? They were just the agents for us.?
Without the veteran HBO broadcast team of Jim Lampley, Max Kellerman and Roy Jones Jr. around to handle the play-by-play and analysis of the fight card, DuBoef was asked who will handle that major task. He would not answer except to say that it is a surprise and ?it will be fantastic.?
DuBoef said ticket sales for the show have been brisk. There were 7,000 tickets on sale for $50 to watch the fight live, but those haven?t been the most popular.
?We?ve had a terrific response,? he said. ?The interesting thing about it is, all the high-end tickets, the big price tickets, we have very few left of those, which is great. There were a lot of the cheaper tickets, and there are still some of those left.?
At the end of the day, duBoef said, putting on their own PPV card is not that much more of an undertaking, because Top Rank?s been doing these kinds of shows for years.
?It?s not like we?re a one-fight promoter, and we?re just starting this. We have a show office, I would say we definitely have the most talented organization in the industry,? duBoef said. ?We?re now going to empower that talent, and we?re going to let everyone do what they do so well.
?I think we have a very good opportunity to stop doing the same old thing and try to be creative and do some creative stuff. It?s obviously a little more work not having somebody at your side doing some of the execution of it. But at the end of the day it?s our vision, it?s our content and it?s our path.
?Either way, we?re going to make the decisions whether the network?s with us or we?re by ourselves.?
