Finally, it seems like HBO and Golden Boy Promotions are coming around to the realization that while putting fights on pay-per-view is OK, there has to be some restraint. Sometimes you have to make top fights and stars available to subscribers (who already pay an extra fee for HBO every month) without an extra $50 PPV price tag. It’s the only way to grow the boxing audience and to keep the one that already exist. You can’t do that if most of the top fighters can’t be seen without an upcharge.
HBO and Golden Boy are going to do just that this spring with two fights that normally would have been on HBO PPV.
HBO is going to pay $6 million or so to televise live the Bernard Hopkins-Joe Calzaghe light heavyweight championship fight on April 19. I appreciate HBO’s desire to showcase a historically significant match that will be the network’s most significant live fight since Lennox Lewis defended the heavyweight championship against Vitali Klitschko on June 21, 2003. I also appreciate the fact that Golden Boy probably left a few dollars on the table by taking the HBO money instead of going for every last penny on pay-per-view.
And two weeks later, on May 3, Oscar De La Hoya, the Golden Boy himself, will fight an opponent to be named live on HBO in his first live network bout since battering Arturo Gatti on March 24, 2001. It is De La Hoya’s way of tuning up for a planned September rematch with Floyd Mayweather. De La Hoya, who plans to retire at the end of 2008, also says it’s his way of giving something back to fans who have spent more than a half-billion dollars buying his pay-per-view events over the years. Whether you believe De La Hoya is doing it just to be a nice guy doesn’t matter. The fact is, fans will get to see boxing’s most popular fighter without having to fork over another 50 bones, and that is a good thing.
The Hopkins-Calzaghe and De La Hoya fights are a welcome relief after an overload of PPV.
Had those two bouts wound up on PPV, it would have meant that HBO would have had a PPV event every single month from October through at least May:
October: Manny Pacquiao-Marco Antonio Barrera II. November: Miguel Cotto-Shane Mosley. December: Mayweather-Ricky Hatton. January: Roy Jones-Felix Trinidad. Coming in February: Kelly Pavlik-Jermain Taylor II. Coming in March: Juan Manuel Marquez-Pacquiao II.
And undoubtedly there will be another PPV card in June, which is historically a big month for a PPV.
The two-month reprieve is desperately needed and will also help HBO’s cornerstone series “World Championship Boxing,” which has become inconsistent in that too often the fights featured are simply replays of the previous week’s PPV main event.
In fact, there have only been three live “WCB” telecasts since last July, which is awful for a series that is supposed to be monthly. The three were all quality shows (the outstanding tripleheader in July featured Paul Williams-Antonio Margarito, Alfonso Gomez-Gatti and Kermit Cintron-Walter Matthysse, the first Pavlik-Taylor fight was on in September and the Calzaghe-Mikkel Kessler showdown was on in November) but there weren’t enough of them. The next one isn’t until Feb. 23 when Wladimir Klitschko and Sultan Ibragimov meet in a heavyweight unification fight.
With Hopkins-Calzaghe and De La Hoya coming to us minus the $50 tariff, Golden Boy is doing smart business and HBO is reasserting itself by living up to what one of its old tag lines used to call it: The Network of Champions.
