Look no further than HBO for an example of how badly the powers that be have mismanaged boxing in 2016. Arguably the sport?s single most powerful entity, HBO and its the collective brain trust are smack-dab in the middle of making an abysmal year even worse.
How? By not featuring this weekend?s welterweight championship fight between Manny Pacquiao and Jessie Vargas on either regular HBO or pay-per-view. Top Rank, the promotional company for both fighters, will run the event instead.
Does HBO even care anymore?
I keep reading about slashed budgets. Is there another business in which budget cuts coincide with such severely lowered expectations? I?ve never had the pleasure. If anything, when money gets tight, a company usually expects its best and brightest to do more with less.
But doing less with less appears to be the prevailing attitude at HBO.
TED ALJIBE/Getty Images Pacman is always must-see TV.
Here?s what?s even more troubling. If HBO is the premier destination for American fight fans it claims to be, the sport is in a heap of trouble right now. If “abysmal” is the new “normal” for boxing, then the sport is on its last legs.
HBO Boxing is fast becoming a cautionary tale for those who believe they, too, are too big to fail. These guys do the same thing over and over and over again. How many times can HBO subject us to the same type of video assets with the same hosts asking the same fighters the same questions? Give HBO executives a $100 million dollar budget or just $1,000 and they do the same thing: create and distribute the same tired media in whatever quantity the budget happens to allow.
The worst parts are the fights.
To date, HBO most relevant entries in 2015 have been two pay-per-views?something you and I buy separately, regardless of whether we?re already subscribed.
In April, HBO sold us a third fight between Pacquiao and Tim Bradley. It was a fight that didn’t generate enough excitement for a rubber match in the first place. And in July, the network pilfered us for that tree-falls-in-a-woods affair between junior welterweights Terence Crawford and Viktor Postol. Both endings were givens before the bell rang, and the buy numbers reflected it.
Chase Stevens/Associated Press Crawford-Postol was on HBO PPV.
While Pacquiao-Vargas would be achingly close to those two bouts in that aspect?Odds Shark lists Pacquiao as a heavy favorite with 2-15 odds?it can at least be said that Pacquiao remains one of the top two or three draws in all of boxing right now.
So why is he not fighting on HBO?
Star power goes a long way in the sport. If we can?t expect riveting matchups between top-level fighters, can we at least see the sport’s big stars do their thing? That is, more than once every blue moon?
Should we commend HBO for the Orlando Salido-Fernando Vargas barnburner? Only partially. Yes, it was a nice little scrap, but there was a time when we expected a few fights like it every year. If HBO now relies on Salido-Vargas-level fights to be the most memorable at the end of the year, boxing might as well be dead.
And what of HBO?s superstars? Isn?t Pacquiao one? Isn?t he the biggest? Shouldn?t the network at the minimum feature him as he seeks the WBO title that?s up for grabs on Saturday night?
HBO’s other stars, however younger than Pacquiao, have done nothing this year to warrant the lame features handed to them. Outside of Sergey Kovalev and Andre Ward, who fight each other next month, HBO?s chosen ones will end up where they started by the end of 2015.
The three most intriguing stars of the group, Canelo Alvarez, Gennady Golovkin and Roman Gonzalez, didn?t fight any foes in 2015 who could raise their profiles. HBO even had the audacity to pit Alvarez and Golovkin, both middleweights, against career welterweights who had done zilch in their own weight classes to prove themselves elite enough make a jump.
On top of all that, all of those fights were on pay-per-view.
Pacquiao-Vargas is as interesting as any of those silly contests at minimum, and if you consider the particulars heading into the fight?Pacquiao?s age, the power of Vargas and Pacquiao?s propensity to get into brawls with brawlers?it is a downright better fight on paper.
To give some credit, however little it might be compared to all the deserved roasting, Kovalev-Ward is the best fight in boxing right now. HBO announcer Jim Lampley may go on and on about that ill-conceived Alvarez-Golovkin fight everyone at his employer seems to want. But Kovalev-Ward features two great fighters who legitimately belong in a ring together right now.
Gregory Payan/Associated Press HBO people like Lampley are salivating over Canelo-Golovkin, a forced bout with a pretty much predetermined outcome.
This isn?t forced matchmaking from TV networks such as HBO because Fighter A has a big fan base and Fighter B is a knockout machine. Kovalev-Ward is a fight about which their fans will argue over social media about as it draws near.
When the bell rings for Kovalev-Ward, it will be what Mayweather-Pacquiao was supposed to be before we had to wait five years to see it?and what Canelo-Golovkin probably never will be?a pick-’em superfight between two of the top pound-for-pound stars in the world.
It’s a shame that people who are either too ignorant or too lazy to do anything but continue boxing?s sad decline toward irrelevancy run the sport. As such, Kovalev-Ward fight probably won?t matter in the grand scheme of things, anyway.
Doubt me? Ask your neighbors who Sergey Kovalev or Andre Ward is. They doesn?t know, and they doesn?t care. Sure, we boxing fans care, but as we age out of existence, so too does boxing?s last, best hope for rebounding to what it once was.
Shall we be optimists like HBO, stick our heads in the sand and hope for the best?
Let?s not. Let?s admit the truth. Boxing is on its last legs. It has been for a long time now.
Our hopes and dreams for a bigger, bolder future for the sport should not hinge on the kinds of people who keep dragging it down. These are the kinds of people who would rather invest in middleweights fighting welterweights than two legitimately good welterweights such as Pacquiao and Vargas stepping into the ring.
John Locher/Associated Press Pacquiao is still at the top of his game. Is HBO?
We need smarter, better people in the sport. We need fresh ideas?such as Al Haymon?s Premier Boxing Champions but with a better focus on the true tenets of what makes boxing great: compelling fights between proven fighters with skill.
And that?s what Pacquiao-Vargas is: a compelling action fight between two proven fighters who are sure to put on a good show. And for crying out loud, one of them is Manny Pacquiao. Pacquiao, one of the best fighters ever, showed against Bradley that he is still arguably the top welterweight in the world today.
HBO cannot continue missing opportunities to bolster its ever-diminishing reputation. Otherwise, boxing will continue to ebb away from the mainstream until no one cares anymore?not even us, the blueblood fight fans HBO is supposed to care about, no matter what its budget is.
