You could see it on their faces last week in Las Vegas. The longtime employees, who have been around during HBO’s heydays of big fights, were wearing long faces despite the impending rematch between Gennady Golovkin and Saul “Canelo” Alvarez.
It very well could have been the final pay-per-view boxing event ever at HBO, which announced Thursday it will no longer broadcast live boxing after 2018, ending a 45-year run.
“It doesn’t mean we’ve shut the door entirely in terms of large-scale events that transcend the sport,” Peter Nelson, the executive vice president of HBO Sports, told The Post. “But it does mean in terms of the granular, day-to-day, niche boxing business, that we believe it’s the right moment to pivot.”
HBO’s boxing demise was a slow death caused partly by its own doing and partly because of a change in the boxing business. Once the premium network for some of the biggest fights in boxing history, HBO’s dominance of the sport’s biggest events and biggest stars faded in recent years because of budget cuts, a decline in ratings, and promoters and fighters signing exclusive deals with other platforms.
Top Rank Inc., which at one time did major business with HBO, signed an exclusive deal with ESPN and its streaming service, ESPN+. UK-based Matchroom Boxing, which is making its presence known in the US, inked a deal worth $1 billion with DAZN, another live-streaming service. Meanwhile, Premier Boxing Champions, which manages many of the top American boxers, is aligned with Showtime and Fox Sports.
Top Rank CEO Bob Arum said days before the Golovkin-Alvarez rematch that HBO and rival Showtime weren’t long for boxing. The pay-per-view bout was the final in the HBO contract for both fighters, and there was no talk of renewing either fighter’s deal.
“HBO doesn’t belong in boxing. Showtime doesn’t belong in boxing,” Arum said. “They’re entertainment networks and I think they’re beginning to realize that. You don’t spend money on an entertainment event that opens and closes the same night. Their competition is one competitor and that’s Netflix — not schmuck boxing.”
The advent of live-streaming on apps like ESPN+ and DAZN (pronounced DA-Zone) coincides with an explosion of original programming on other outlets to attract subscribers. It’s not about boxing anymore as it is about “Billions,” not the money, but the television show.
“They make their money on entertainment — on ‘Sopranos,’ on ‘Sex and the City,’ on ‘Billions,’” Arum said. “That’s their business. It’s stupid business for them to put money into boxing where the fight opens and closes the same night. If you put that money into a series and that series hits, then you can syndicate it for billions of dollars. Five years from now, everything will be streaming — entertainment, sports, everything will be streaming.”
HBO never fully recovered after legends like George Foreman, Sugar Ray Leonard, Mike Tyson, Evander Holyfield and Oscar De La Hoya retired, and then new HBO leadership openly feuded with and alienated Arum and Al Haymon, the creator of the PBC.
Showtime, with its alliance to Floyd Mayweather and the PBC, surpassed HBO as boxing’s premium network outlet, making Thursday’s decision inevitable.
“We’ve seen audience research that indicates boxing is no longer a determining factor for our subscribers,” Nelson said.
A lack of star power and compelling bouts contributed to that. HBO’s final boxing broadcast will come Oct. 27 featuring Brooklyn middleweight Daniel Jacobs fighting Sergiy Derevyanchenko for the IBF middleweight title at the Hulu Theater at Madison Square Garden.