Tonight, a split-site doubleheader on HBO takes place from Mexico City (where Saul Alvarez faces Kermit Cintron) and Cincinnati (where Adrien Broner takes on Vicente Martin Rodriguez). This will be another installment of ?Boxing After Dark? but it will be the last for Golden Boy Promotions under their exclusive output deal they inked a few years ago while Ross Greenburg was President of HBO Sports.
Greenburg was jettisoned during the summer and soon ex-Showtime boxing czar Ken Hershman will take over the position beginning in early January.
When this agreement was made (ensuring that Golden Boy got a certain amount of dates on HBO every year), it was during the era when they could leverage the pay-per-view titan that was Oscar De La Hoya. However, the ?Golden Boy? was retired by Manny Pacquiao in December of 2008 and as this deal comes to an end, GBP must more or less operate on the same playing field with the rest of its competitors.
According to their CEO, Richard Schaefer, for them, it will be business as usual.
?In a way, it changes and in other ways, it doesn?t,? he told Maxboxing earlier this week. ?What will not change is that we are going to continue to try to put together the best possible fights and the fact is with HBO and the new leadership with Ken Hershman and with Showtime under the new leadership of Stephen Espinoza, the both of them are starting the New Year from scratch, fresh. So both networks are interested in bringing the best fights to their respective subscribers and it?s going to be interesting.?
The hope is that by having all the dates essentially open, that instead of a litany of in-house match-ups, the best possible bouts can be made between all the promotional firms. Golden Boy actually delivered some solid fights under their agreement (from Juan Manuel Marquez-Michael Katsidis and, most recently, James Kirkland-Alfredo Angulo) but with ?their dates,? they could be every bit as insular as Top Rank, who is so often accused of keeping things under its own umbrella. This weekend?s show is interesting, to say the least. While nobody can deny ?Canelo?s? appeal at the box-office or in the Nielsens, he?s facing an opponent who, in his last appearance on a premium cable network in July, was beaten decisively by Carlos Molina. And Broner facing an unknown Argentinean for one of those belts that HBO always tells us are so meaningless, well, that?s another example of the influence of the (Al) Haymon Boxing Organization.
