Part 3 of a multi-part series.
This is what Jim Lampley of HBO Sports said on air in the aftermath of Pacquiao’s destruction of Marco Antonio Barrera on November 15th:
“Well, it sets up Pacquiao for some huge fights and some big money in the future. They say it’s reported that of the $700,000 purse that was directed towards Pacquiao tonight, he himself is only getting 300-grand of it. So he deserves the chance to make big money in the future.”
Murad Muhammad is puzzled as to why an HBO announcer would make the figures from his license fee so public.
“One of the greatest upsets in boxing, you would think they would be saying ‘Murad Muhammad did it again, oh my God! He brings us Roy Jones Jr. and gets the heavyweight champion John Ruiz. How did he convince Don King? Roy does it and he’s back again.’ Naaahhh, they don’t say that. They say ‘Manny ain’t got a damn thing. Manny got $700,000 and went home with three.
“How can someone come out and slay my good name and don’t care nuthin’ about my wife and my children, eight of them. They don’t care about 28 years of marriage.”
Muhammad claims that when he went back to his hotel room that threatening messages were left on his phone. So shortly after the fight and the revelations had come out, Muhammad went out to do some damage control.
“I pick up the phone and I go to the source,” Muhammad explained to MaxBoxing. “I picked up the phone and I called Larry Merchant and said ‘Larry, I understand that it was you who helped Freddie Roach to find a law firm to come against me.’ He said ‘Murad, I only thought I was helping him.’
“I said ‘Larry, I introduced you guys to boxing. HBO didn’t know they could televise boxing until I walked into Time-Warner.’ I’M, the one!!! Not King, not Arum. I gave you you’re first fight, from that day to the day, I have honesty and credibility with HBO. Why don’t you pick up the phone and call me and ask me?’
“How is it that a TRAINER, can come to you and give you a figure and you believe it!? So he said ‘What can I do?’ ‘Larry, can you try and straighten this out?’ He said ‘Murad, I will.’ Of course he couldn’t straighten it out because they were too far gone.”
First of all, Muhammad didn’t actually go to the source, since it was Lampley who stated on air the license fee and it’s breakdown, not Merchant. Who remembers a much different conversation than Muhammad.
“I get a call, days, weeks later from Murad telling me what a wonderful promoter he is, how much he’s done for this kid, that it wasn’t $350,000, it was really $500,000 plus a $60,000 Filipino television license fee,” Merchant told MaxBoxing, recalling his chat with the promoter. “And for all I hear, all that’s turned out to be not true. That was not $500,000, unless he’s now given them another $150,000 since that time.”
And Merchant is flabbergasted when told of Muhammad’s claim that he was the one who advised Roach on which attorneys to bring in.
“I had nothing to do with it,” insisted a shocked Merchant. “They called me, they called me to tell me that they were going to be acting on behalf of Manny Pacquiao and I said ‘I can’t do anything for you. Call HBO and tell them I never heard of these guys before.”
Like most conversations with Muhammad, it was usually traffic that was directed in one direction.
“It was more of a long monologue by him of all the things he’s done for all the fighters,” said Merchant, chuckling. “All the negotiations he did, etc, etc. I asked him a couple of questions and that was it.”
But was it news to him that it was Muhammad that brought boxing to his company?
“It sure is,” he replied laughing. “We did fights with Ali before HBO was a company, HBO was just a signal. We did Ali fights, Frazier-Foreman and so on and so forth back in the ?70s. So the notion that he introduced boxing to HBO is more of his inflated idea of what he’s done in boxing.”
After pausing for a few seconds, Merchant came to this conclusion: “Murad Muhammad, obviously invented boxing. Not just at HBO, but he goes back to John L. Sullivan and Mendoza the Jew.”
Hmmm, the ?Murad of Queensbury??
But remember, it wasn’t Merchant that mentioned the financial details over the air, it was his partner.
“Lampley, for whatever reason, another gentleman I’ve been knowing for umpteen years, we’ve always had good conversation, I assume when this got to Lampley, he was under the impression ‘My God, this kid is getting beat’. So he did something that’s never been done ? he disclosed the LICENSE FEE of the promoter,” said a disgusted Muhammad.
But Lampley says he had absolutely no problem doing so.
“There was no hesitation to go with the information,” Lampley tells MaxBoxing. “My source was good enough for me to believe that the information was fundamentally and essentially correct. Other people I had referred it to all felt the same way. And so I was quite confident that when I said ‘Pacquiao was netting $300,000 out of the $700,000’. I was within range of the truth.
“If I knew then all the things I have learned since I said it, then I would have been able to be more specific and paint a darker picture. I was being liberal in estimating how much money Manny got. He almost certainly didn’t wind up with that much in his pocket from the money that was earned that night.”
And despite rumors to the contrary, Muhammad says that he will not be suing HBO for slander or libel. Although, he did send a letter through an attorney protesting the comments made on the air.
“I would never threaten to sue HBO,” Muhammad says. “I make a living with HBO and because I believe, and I do believe it, I believe Jim Lampley doesn’t hate Murad Muhammad. Matter of fact, I do believe he made a mistake. He was misinformed and he should’ve called me. He didn’t, he’s human, he made a mistake. So I wrote a letter and said I have no intentions of suing HBO because HBO’s been good to me and I’ve been good to HBO for 26 years.”
Lampley said he got no reprimands from the higher-ups and management at HBO.
“Zero problem. No reprimand, nothing of the sort, only encouragement and support,” he said. “All the people you’re talking about knew the same thing that I knew or probably in some instances more details than I did prior to saying what I said on the air.”
It’s obvious that Lampley’s comments after the fight clearly became part of this dispute involving the fighter, promoter, managers and trainer. At what point is a line crossed between merely covering an event, and becoming intrinsically involved?
“The unique thing about boxing, among all sports, is that every single event is an entrepreneurial happening. They’re like snowflakes, they’re like movies. Unless an organic or chemical alignment of forces takes place and usually as much by luck as by design, big fights don’t happen,” said the eloquent Lampley. “So therefore, covering the business details of a fight, covering the details of how the promotion has taken place and who gets paid what, is entirely logical and important to the sport.”
Merchant says that the issue of Pacquiao’s compensation for the bout with Barrera was clearly a subject that needed to be addressed within the context of the fight.
“It was an issue because we had heard about his unhappiness in the previous fight in San Francisco (versus Agapito Sanchez in 2001), Merchant said. ?It had become an issue of whether he was being treated fairly. We had discussed these things from time to time on other occasions.
“For example, when Bernard Hopkins fought his first fight with Roy Jones, we discussed it about Hopkins, his complaints about that.”
Merchant recalled that the issue was also brought up during Hopkins’ title defense against Carl Daniels. It was over a purse bid that left Daniels with a minuscule purse.
“We don’t do this normally, we don’t always have this information ourselves,? he said. ?It’s only when the fighters and their managers complain that we hear about these things.”
So how will they cover future Pacquiao fights with Muhammad as the promoter?
“Not only will it come up again, but as soon as that fight is announced, my very first call should be to Murad Muhammad to ask him what are the business circumstances of the fight, what Manny’s getting, what he?s getting,” insisted Lampley. “So that we’re both clear and comfortable on the subject before we ever go on the air.”
(Part IV: The previous tug-of-wars for the services of Manny Pacquiao.)
