Tonight at the Martins Valley Mansion in Cockeysville, Maryland, TKO Boxing, in association with the Jonathan Ogden Foundation, presents their the third annual installment of ?An Evening Ringside,? a card which will raise money for local charities and local high school athletes in the Baltimore area. This is TKO Boxing’s first show since July 2nd in Ontario, California that featured a nationally-televised main event between Demetrius Hopkins and Mike Arnaoutis.
In the aftermath of that show at the Citizens Business Bank Arena, their checks started to bounce like Spaldings and a growing list of fighters and managers became justifiably disgruntled and rumors and reports ran rampant that TKO was down for the count. They had gone the way of Harold Smith, Josephine Abercrombie, Bostick Boxing and America Presents.
Well, they haven’t gone the distance, just yet, but they haven’t been TKO’d either.
“TKO isn’t going anywhere. We’re here to stay,” said their president, Chet Koerner. Asked to explain their lost summer, he told Maxboxing, “TKO is the age old example; we over-expanded. We bit off more than we could chew and we have recapitalized the company and we’ve realized the mistakes we made and we’re moving forward.”
Like many other failed outfits of the past, TKO came in with big dreams and a vision of changing the business. Lots of people have come into this realm with the best of intentions till they find out that the boxing industry is a jungle, one that is not easily survived or navigated. As Bob Arum once said about the failed upstarts of the past, “The desert is strewn with bleached bones.”
Was TKO naive or misguided about their mission statement?
“Maybe not so much the boxing business; we just over-expanded,” insisted Koerner. “We signed too many fighters and too many shows and we didn’t focus on what was important to us- which is ‘the Hometown Heroes to World Champions’ and we just got caught up in the market and the market took a downturn. We over-extended; we made some mistakes.”
But during this stretch, were they ever going to close up shop?
“TKO was never going to fold up,” Koerner stated. “It’s going to be here forever. Every person we owed money to, we paid and we’re moving forward. All those rumors are completely bogus and not true.” Not helping matters was that during this period of time, Koerner kept silent and was about as hard to reach as J.D. Salinger. He explained of his low profile, “The problem with the boxing world is if somebody takes a sh*t in Los Angeles, somebody in Miami knows about it. I wasn’t going to address things that were untrue. What TKO does is we put our heads down; we do our business; we had to take care of business, take care of people we owed and that’s what I did.”
There seem to be a particular glee that TKO was seemingly going the way of Enron or the Titanic. “Absolutely,” agreed Koerner, who had a theory why that was, “because TKO is flat-out a threat to the old guard.”
