Is Al Haymon's Premier Boxing Champions Sustainable?

Boxing made its long-awaited return to prime-time network television on Saturday night when Keith Thurman defeated Robert Guerrero by unanimous decision in the inaugural edition of Premier Boxing Champions (PBC) on NBC, a stripped-down, scrubbed-up and sterilized version of the sweet science intended to bring the sport of boxing back to the mainstream.

Reviews of the offering itself, which also featured Adrien Broner’s wide decision win over John Molina, were mostly positive. Bad Left Hook’s Scott Christ was particularly impressed with the overall production value of the show, a sentiment shared by many via social media during the night of the fight:

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The production was off the charts for boxing, and it immediately felt more like watching a true mainstream sports show than just another boxing show. More than HBO or Showtime, PBC on NBC felt very modern and slick. That's not to say anything is really wrong with HBO or Showtime production-wise, because they do a great job. But this was different.

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While some hardcore boxing fans seemed befuddled over some of the cosmetic changes to their beloved sport—things like fighters heading to the ring alone to a PBC-chosen instrumental score created by Hans Zimmer—the vibe on social media during and after the show was one of hopeful optimism.

That sentiment continued on, something those who follow the sport know isn’t easy to come by among the often jaded and dismissive fans of boxing, after viewership numbers were released earlier this week.

According to a press release, PBC on NBC was the most watched boxing broadcast in 17 years, when Oscar De La Hoya’s Fight Night card on FOX totaled 5.9 million viewers in 1998. PBC averaged 3.4 million, and its viewership increased the longer the show went on, peaking at 4.2 million during the latter half of the main event.

Not bad for NBC’s first major prime-time boxing broadcast in over 30 years.

Harry How/Getty Images

If you’re in boxing’s corner in its effort to once again capture a significant share in the lucrative market of mainstream American sports, it gets even better. According to Bloody Elbow’s Fraser Coffeen, PBC even topped recent viewership numbers for UFC cards on Fox. Furthermore, the trend suggests the comparative media darling’s MMA shows are moving downward, perhaps signaling room within the landscape of combat sports for which boxing can capitalize on:

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The highest rated UFC on Fox show remains the first ever event (Velasquez vs. Dos Santos I) which drew 5.7 million viewers back in 2011. Overall, only 4 of the 14 UFC on Fox events have beaten this PBC show in terms of viewers – none more recent than UFC on Fox 6: Johnson vs. Dodson in January 2013 (3.77 million).

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Take a bow, boxing fans. Because PBC just proved what you already knew deep down in your hearts. There are millions of boxing fans in the United States and if you present these loyal people with a good product, advertise it well and make it available for free on network television, they will cram in front of their TV sets to watch it.

But not everyone within the boxing world believes PBC’s ratings success is something worth celebrating just yet. Main Events CEO Kathy Duva remains skeptical the newly constructed enterprise can be successful in the long term.

“There’s never been any doubt that people will watch network TV if there’s boxing on,” Duva told Bleacher Report. “It’s a good, healthy audience. That’s never been in question. The problem is sponsorship. Sponsors see the numbers, and they don’t care.”

Credit: Rich Graessle/Main Events

Duva, who referred to boxing as the “last bastion of true free enterprise,” said the sport has an image problem, one that can’t be fixed by the absence of fighter entourages, ring card girls and alphabet title belts.

Moreover, she said she’s not sure boxing would even have the same draw without at least some of the very image that scares sponsors off in the first place.

“One of the problems with boxing is its image. It’s also part of the charm of boxing. That’s the dichotomy of the sport. It’s our curse and our blessing. The character of the sport is, in some respects, what makes it appealing. The unruliness of it…that’s part of what makes it interesting. That’s part of why the whole world will assemble and watch a big pay-per-view fight, because it’s such a big deal when it happens.”

Duva’s take is one shared by some others within the boxing community as well. Boxing writer Bart Barry recently penned a column for 15 Rounds noting the same:

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Boxing has long preserved a griminess, a degree of filth, other sports lost generations before; boxing retained a sense of the unexpected in a way that made other sports appear overwrought and scripted…. Television was a guest at boxing events, or at least telecasts felt like they were conducted by guests; proper boxing matches had a sense of inevitability to them, an implication this grievance would be settled, regardless of witness, at this time, on this evening, and television cameras just happened to be there.

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For Barry, and perhaps other traditionalists, a touch of what made boxing unique was absent in Saturday’s PBC show:

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Saturday’s NBC debut, instead, had other sports’ feel: We are here because television invited us, and do you know how great is the reach of public airwaves? And have you seen our incredible commentating team? And would you please have a listen to our soundtrack? If it did not feel quite scripted, it neither felt like a collection of brawls that were going to happen even if television cameras went dark.

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Or as Duva put it: “Boxing is not like other sports.”

Duva said mainstream sponsors, the kind PBC will require going forward, have not wanted to attach themselves to boxing in the past. She said the best boxing has been able to attract were beer companies, and that even if that were to somehow change with substantial enough viewership numbers, sponsors would still expect the discounted advertising rates they usually get for combat sports like boxing, MMA and professional wrestling.

Still, she conceded sponsors could evolve over time. They might not always see boxing as a fringe endeavor, something not worth their time and money. The cleaned-up, guilt-free version of boxing PBC offered on NBC could potentially be accepted by the masses someday, and boxing, along with PBC, could become a more mainstream attraction.

But sponsorships would still be difficult to sell in comparison to other sports. Moreover, she said while it may be possible to create a space for mid-level boxing shows on network television, something she did herself on NBC in recent years, doing so for big-money fights would remain next to impossible.

“What it really comes down to is that we cannot plan a major event with any degree of certainty. We cannot with any degree of certainty tell a sponsor that a big fight is actually going to happen until [the fighters] are done training and there is no chance for injury.”

Harry How/Getty Images

Moreover, boxing cannot sell sponsorships in the traditional manner. A fight promoter cannot offer spots between such-and-such rounds in the main event without the caveat that the rounds in question may not come to fruition before the bout is over and the intended audience has changed the channel.

“A fight can last one round. The Super Bowl is going to last over three hours no matter what happens.”

Regardless, Duva said the most alarming thing for her and others within the sport is that PBC sets the expectation among television networks that they should be paid to show boxing on TV rather then networks paying license fees. She said she’s had TV executives tell her that very thing since PBC’s time-buy venture was first announced.

The Sweet Science’s Thomas Hauser explained how PBC went about orchestrating a heavy schedule of time buys on NBC, NBC Sports Network, CBS, CBS Sports Network, Spike, Bounce TV and Telemundo. He also indicated a time buy on ESPN2 was expected to be announced soon as well as how PBC might be planning to recoup its investment:

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The time buys allow Haymon to bypass normal media filters in delivering his boxing programming to the public. In a sense, they’re similar to the paid infomercials that run on television at odd hours asking consumers to buy a five-CD set of “Golden Oldies.” Only here, Haymon’s investors hope to recoup their investment through the sale of advertising, pay-per-view fights, and (possibly) a subscription package and/or public stock offering.

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A spokesperson for Haymon Boxing Management would offer no comment on any of it. But Duva seems to be on to something. Why would the rules suddenly change for PBC in regards to finding an abundance of advertisers willing to attach themselves to boxing?

As Fight News’ Karl Freitag noted recently, boxing hasn’t had much trouble drawing in viewers for network television shows.

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Over the last two years, NBC televised several Saturday afternoon cards with very good audiences such as Adamek-Cunningham with 1.6 million viewers (3.2 million peak) and Fury-Cunningham 1.2 million viewers (1.7 million peak). The numbers dropped off for later NBC afternoon cards, but premium-network quality cards will likely once again attract millions.

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Why weren’t sponsors lining up then?

Duva promoted both the Adamek-Cunningham and Fury-Cunningham shows on NBC. She said each time the numbers came back, she expected to be able to sell sponsorship for her now defunct Fight Night series. She said each time NBC would come back and tell her no sponsors had come forward despite the impressive ratings.

“The thing I’m torn with is that I wish to God it was so easy, that you could just put this on and get a big rating and get the sponsors to pay because there are a lot of sponsors out there. And if boxing becomes a mainstream sport again, I will profit from it in a very big way. I promise you I will because there are other networks and there are other ways to distribute and, frankly, we’re just a couple years away from the distribution model of everything being different. When we get into a digital world, there will be other aggregators. There will be other ways. I’m not worried about that in the least. The problem is in the short term.”

The question becomes clear. How long can PBC endure if it can’t find sponsors?

“The problem is sustaining it. How do you get from there, where you’re losing tons of money, to where they are going to pay you tons of money? That’s a giant gulf.”

Mary Altaffer/Associated Press

Duva also questions the high purse size of the first PBC card. All four fighters on Saturday’s show made more money by themselves than Duva’s total show purse sizes of $150,000. She said it distorts the market and cannot be sustained.

“What are you going to have to pay fighters to take on a real challenge? And how is that viable? How is it feasible? Now, you’ve distorted the market for the fighters too. There’s going to be ramifications of this.”

Duva says the PBC purses were not driven by market forces but the deep pockets of investors who essentially don’t know what they’re doing. She likened it to people who decide to open up a restaurant because they like to eat.

“I spent $150,000 on the purses for the shows I did and the high point was 3.2 million people. They spent $6 million on their purses and their high point was 4.2 million. Something is distorted there. It’s not sustainable.”

Boxing Scene’s Rick Reeno reported that boxing insiders believe Haymon is attempting to create a boxing series modeled after the UFC:

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There are many in the boxing industry who strongly believe Haymon is attempting to replicate certain aspects of the UFC’s business model – based on the obvious pattern of staging PBC cards that are entirely comprised of fighters contracted to Haymon Boxing. Like the UFC, Haymon’s company has set up their own website with a variety of professional writers providing articles and coverage on Haymon-managed fighters and PBC events.

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But Duva does not believe the UFC model can be successful in boxing.

“The UFC’s model is built around PPV bringing in the bulk of the revenue and the fighters making less than 10 percent of the income. Our business is built on the PPV money going to the fighter.”

Duva said UFC’s Rhonda Rousey was a good illustration of the wage gap between boxing and UFC models. She said Rousey would have made exponentially more money than she made for her last UFC fight due to the amount of PPVs that were sold, guessing it’d be roughly 10 times more than the around $1 million Rousey reportedly pocketed.

“At some point…the PBC purses would have to be dropped to 10 percent of what they are now if they want to be like the UFC.”

Still, you might wonder what the harm of Haymon’s endeavor might be. Why not give it a try? Why does Duva care what Haymon and the PBC are doing at all? Her company, Main Events, remains well positioned with HBO providing a number of fights on Saturday’s upcoming card in Montreal, including the headliner, light heavyweight star Sergey Kovalev.

“If this works, it will be great for me. But my fear is that it doesn’t work, that he runs out of money, that the networks turn around and say boxing doesn’t work and that they’re done with it.”

Duva admitted it was hard for her to see all the work she and her company did to get boxing back on NBC go by the wayside when Haymon’s PBC came along. She said she doesn’t begrudge anyone at NBC because it’s a great deal for it to get paid to show boxing rather than having to pay license fees via the traditional method.

Tim Larsen/Associated Press

But Duva remains critical on the efficacy of PBC’s business model. She doesn’t see how the economics of it work and is afraid it won’t be sustainable over the long term and end up doing more damage to the sport than good in the end.

“The thing about something appearing to be too good to be true is that it’s usually too good to be true.”

But like any good promoter, one with an eye on all possibilities, Duva’s pessimism is at least tempered with optimism of a potential opportunity, even if it seems unlikely to her at the moment.

“There’s room in this business for more than one promoter, and there will be room in this business if [PBC] is successful for more than one series,” said Duva with a laugh.

“I’d love to be proven wrong.”

Unless otherwise noted, all quotes were obtained firsthand. Kelsey McCarson also contributes to The Sweet Science and Boxing Channel.