If you ask Top Rank chairman Bob Arum what he thinks of Golden Boy Promotions, he’ll tell you a mouthful for sure.
Arum has the highest respects for Golden Boy president Oscar de la Hoya whom he promoted as a fighter for years. But he objects to Golden Boy chief executive officer Richard Schaefer’s “machinations.”
Still, he absolves Schaefer of pure guilt, referring to him as a Swiss banker (which he was), not a boxing man. The inference is if Schaefer were a boxing man like de la Hoya, he wouldn’t be doing what he does for Golden Boy.
Kathy Duva, the chief executive officer of Main Events, once called Golden Boy the “Wal-Mart” of the boxing business, referring to the retail chain that specializes in cutthroat pricing.
Writer Michael Swann said Duva has accused Golden Boy of ‘”poaching’ talent nurtured by other promoters, upsetting the economic balance in the marketplace by using de la Hoya’s considerable ring earnings to offset losses incurred by signing free agent fighters to contracts that make impossible for a rival promoter to be competitive and still make a profit.”
Because the fight game is big business, money talks in the backroom where sometimes, honor and principles are thrown out the window.
A case in point is the tug-of-war for boxing icon Manny Pacquiao’s promotional rights between Top Rank and Golden Boy.
Last September, Golden Boy enticed Pacquiao to sign a seven-fight contract with a $350,000 signing bonus and a $150,000 advance on future purses. De la Hoya himself convinced Pacquiao to join his group in a hush-hush meeting at a five-star steakhouse in Los Angeles.
When Arum found out about the signing, he reminded Pacquiao of a stipulation in his existing contract with Top Rank. Arum said the Top Rank contract — in force until after Pacquiao’s third fight against Erik Morales — prohibited the Filipino from signing another promotional contract during its course.
Pacquiao then renounced the Golden Boy contract and returned the $500,000 — which of
course, wasn’t received by the de la Hoya camp to keep the option open of going to court for redress. After the Morales fight, Arum announced that Pacquiao had signed a new Top Rank contract for the next four years. Arum reportedly gave Pacquiao a $1 million signing bonus.
Arum certainly didn’t build Pacquiao into a major pay-per-view attraction only to surrender him to Golden Boy.
Duva said Golden Boy’s moves smack of trying to create a monopoly in the fight game.
“When you’re running your business with the intention of running your competitors out of business, it’s a shame,” she said. “Because when you succeed, what do you have? You have Wal-Mart. Either Golden Boy, Oscar, becomes the single distributor of boxing to HBO in which case HBO will have to pay whatever he tells them or at some point, the fighters will have nowhere to go and he’ll tell them how much they’re making, maybe both. If you want to get your fighter on HBO, you’re going to have to fight a Golden Boy fighter because they have all the dates. And HBO says no they don’t but they do.”
Golden Boy recently announced the signing of Diego Corrales but promoter Gary Shaw contested it, insisting the fighter has a live contract with him. Golden Boy also made a whopping offer to snatch Juan Diaz from Duva but was eventually outbidded by Don King.
Swann quoted another promoter who questioned Golden Boy’s business practices.
“King and Arum were the dominant figures in the sport for many years,” said the unidentified promoter. “Now everybody sees an opportunity for the next generation. Golden Boy shows up and is quickly becoming the dominant player in the sport. I think that dominance is going to hurt the sport.
“You sign a guy, give him a whole bunch of money and how do you get that money back? You take it from the other side. The fighter will pay for it. I don’t understand Golden Boy’s business. They have a large overhead. They’re overpaying fighters to sign. They’re taking in fighters (like Marco Antonio Barrera, Bernard Hopkins and Sugar Shane Mosley) as partners. Are they equity partners? Are these guys ever going to see anything on their investment if there was an investment?
“The networks are starting to see it a little bit. Originally, HBO was all for Golden Boy and they’re starting to pull back a little bit. They’re starting to understand that the networks are competitors of the promoters but the promoters don’t realize this. If the promoters got together, they could dictate what the networks pay for a fight instead of undercutting each other. The networks are now seeing that if Oscar dominates the business, Golden Boy can dictate to them what they get. They’re starting to realize that they might have created a monster.”
It isn’t unexpected that rival promoters are hurling brickbats at Golden Boy.
Surely, Schaefer can’t be chastised for trying to position Golden Boy as the dominant figure in the fight game. He’s just doing his job.
In the short term, the top fighters are the beneficiaries of this wild and wooly grab for talent. They’re the prize catches. But if and when a dominant promoter cleans up, don’t expect the fighters to be the ultimate winners of the money war.
If Arum or Golden Boy or Duva or King or whoever else begins to dictate on what fight to put on pay-per-view, the fighters — who put their lives on the line in the ring — will be under the gun. That will be a sad day for boxing when the businessman, who doesn’t take a single punch in a fight, laughs all the way to the bank.
