On the night of Saturday, May 2, rival TV networks HBO and Showtime will temporarily suspend their corporate hostilities in order to work together for a higher cause?namely, reeling in a hefty payday. For a few, strategically collegiate hours, the typically antagonistic networks will co-produce what is expected to be the highest grossing pay-per-view event in the history of television: the title fight between Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. At first blush, the prospect of HBO making TV with Showtime sounds a bit like Coke making soda with Pepsi, or the Hatfields apple-bobbing with the McCoys. How did it happen?
Call it the sweet science of network d?tente.
For years, boxing fans have been clamoring to see Mayweather fight Pacquiao, only to have their hopes crash against the unforgiving walls separating one media conglomerate’s territorial advantages from the other’s. Mayweather fights exclusively for CBS’s Showtime, while Pacquiao is under contact with Time Warner’s HBO.
Then in February, after a chance encounter between Mayweather and Pacquiao at a Miami Heat game, HBO and Showtime revealed that the two networks had been working behind the scenes and had hammered out an agreement. Together, HBO and Showtime will co-produce and co-distribute a pay-per-view broadcast staffed by a combination of on-air talent mixed and matched from each network. Both are promoting the fight and, according to the New York Times, will share equally in a cut of the the resulting pay-per-view windfall. During the fight, graphics that appear on the screen will be co-branded.
At a joint press conference, Ken Hershman, president of HBO Sports, and Stephen Espinoza, a top executive for Showtime Sports, said that the temporary media truce would benefit both networks, the fighters, and the entire sport of boxing. They noted that the negotiations had been tough but fair. While declining to get into the specific sources of the conflict, they noted that each side had made concessions. Much of the credit, they said, should go to their respective corporate chieftains, particularly HBO’s Richard Plepler and CBS’s Leslie Moonves, who did a lot of the difficult face-to-face wrangling between the fighters’ camps.
Espinoza and Hershman said their longtime professional relationship?before defecting to HBO in 2011, Hershman worked at Showtime for roughly 20 years?helped them bring together the standoffish institutions. At one point during the press conference, a reporter asked how the challenge of negotiating between the rancorous companies had affected their relationship.
“We’re best friends,” joked Hershman.
“Look, we work for competitors,” he added. “But it doesn’t mean that we don’t travel with the same people in the same circles. We’ve known each other a long time. There’s a lot of history. … It’s a very healthy relationship. It doesn’t matter if we’re going out for a beer afterwards. What’s important is that we did everything we could to get this deal done.”
Espinoza noted that they’d worked together on a variety of projects in a range of different roles over the years. They first got to know each other many years earlier, he said, when Espinoza was working as a lawyer for Mike Tyson and Hershman was working in legal and business affairs at Showtime. Their long track record of collegiality helped, he said. “Just because it was a complex, complicated negotiation doesn’t mean that it was confrontational,” said Espinoza. “This got done in a respectful and collegial way.”
It also helped, they said, that there was a historical precedent. In 2002, HBO and Showtime teamed up to co-produce the pay-per-view fight between Lennox Lewis and Mike Tyson for the heavyweight title. “It provided a really good road map for all of us,” said Hershman.
Looking back, Ross Greenburg, who brokered the Tyson-Lewis fight on behalf of HBO, and Mark Greenberg, who did so for Showtime, say the challenging experience was ultimately well worth the headaches. At the time, Lewis was under exclusive contract with HBO. Tyson was fighting for Showtime. “It was almost impossible,” says Ross Greenburg, who now runs an eponymous production business. “We had to put our egos aside and say, ‘you know what, this is about doing something bigger than either of us,'” recalls Mark Greenberg, who is now chief executive officer of Studio 3 Partners.
?There’s a lot of history. … It’s a very healthy relationship.?
In the end, the Tyson-Lewis fight sold 1.97 million pay-per-view subscriptions, making it one of the most lucrative fights of all time. “You’re competitive rivals,” says Greenberg. “But at the end of the day, it’s not brain-surgery. It’s boxing on TV.”
Much like their contemporary counterparts, when Greenberg and Greenburg sat down over lunch in 2001 to try to craft an alliance between the networks, they already knew each other. They had spent years working together as colleagues at HBO before Greenberg left for a job at Showtime. “The two of us were friends for a long time and genuinely liked each other,” says Greenburg. “That made it easier for us.”
Before it was all over, the surprising partnership between the bellicose networks would be compared favorably with a brief truce that allowed British and Germans soldiers to play soccer together during World War I. Still, in January 2002, the fragile alliance of HBO and Showtime nearly fell apart when a pre-fight press conference between Tyson and Lewis turned into an ugly brawl that culminating in Tyson’s allegedly biting Lewis’s leg and cursing members of the assembled press.
Originally the fight had been scheduled to take place in Las Vegas. After the brawl, the state of Nevada denied Tyson a fighting license. HBO and Showtime were left scrambling to find a new venue. Eventually, Tennessee stepped in and granted Tyson a license. The networks moved the event to the Pyramid Arena in Memphis.
Before the fight could proceed, however, HBO pushed for a further concession. “I demanded that we have a security force break the ring in half … so Tyson couldn’t go off and give him a fight before the fight,” recalls Greenburg. His counterpart at Showtime did not object. “It was Ross’s idea after the biting incident to put the police in between them in the ring,” says Greenberg. “It was great theatrics. Credit to him.”
Throughout the build up, HBO designed and rolled out the primary marketing campaign. “You had to respect their creativity,” says Greenberg. “Who cares who did it? We weren’t selling HBO or Showtime. We were selling the fighters.”
On the night of the fight, things went smoothly on camera. Greenberg says the melded team of on-air talent performed admirably. “They rose to a higher level that night,” says Greenberg. “It actually made for a better announce team. It was fresh, and the consumers loved it.”
Behind the scenes, there were no further incidents of alleged leg biting. One thing that helped, says Greenberg, is that at the time, both HBO and Showtime relied heavily on freelance crew members such as cameramen and runners to help produce big fights. As it turned out, both networks had been using many of the same freelancers for years. Much of the crew had already worked together. “When they got to the venue, they just needed to know which t-shirt to put on: HBO or Showtime,” says Greenberg. “In the end, we went with a neutral t-shirt.”
Both sides recall that the biggest sticking point was deciding which network would get the rights to replay the fight. Eventually, they decided that whichever network’s boxer triumphed would get first crack at the rebroadcast spoils, while the losing network would be compensated with a one-time lump sum. In the end, Lewis knocked Tyson out in the 8th round. HBO got the delayed broadcast. Showtime got a check for $3 million.
This time around, HBO and Showtime have reportedly agreed that each will rebroadcast the fight, regardless of the winner. But once the bout ends, the inter-premium-cable-network affair will, too. “I don’t see this opening the floodgates to more collaborations,” says Hershman.
