“Fighting Words” — Boxing’s Cold Wars May Never End

by David P. Greisman

When Oscar De La Hoya and Floyd Mayweather Jr. fought eight years ago, some described it as the fight that could save boxing. It wasn’t, of course. And when Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao finally face each other on May 2, it won’t mark the end of any of the so-called cold wars that have plagued this sport for years.

Yes, Mayweather-Pacquiao will mark the first time that HBO and Showtime have cooperated on a pay-per-view since Lennox Lewis fought Mike Tyson in 2002.

Yes, it will mark the first time that Mayweather has worked alongside Top Rank since he bought out his contract in 2006 with the promoter that had signed him prior to his pro debut a decade before.

And yes, Mayweather-Pacquiao brought Top Rank’s Bob Arum back into negotiations with Mayweather’s adviser, Al Haymon, about whom Arum had expressed so much frustration ever since they failed to make a bout between Kelly Pavlik, then the middleweight champion and an Arum fighter, and Paul Williams, who was one of Haymon’s clients.

Mayweather-Pacquiao is great for the sport. It brings a massive amount of attention to the Sweet Science at a time when it is attempting to grow back from beyond its niche audience. It comes after five years in which the casual followers and non-fans saw the continued lack of a fight between Floyd and Manny as emblematic of the problems plaguing professional pugilism.

In reality, Mayweather and Pacquiao hadn’t fought because Mayweather and Pacquiao — and their teams — had found reasons for them not to fight. Their egos got in the way until, finally, they realized how silly that situation was. They could make far more money together than they could by remaining apart. Mayweather-Pacquiao hadn’t happened when both were with HBO. Mayweather’s move to Showtime in 2013 wasn’t what kept it from occurring since then. The networks have found a way to work together.

But the kind of cold wars that have existed in recent years, keeping several fights from happening, will remain. That’s because Mayweather-Pacquiao is the exception. It is a fight too big to allow the boxing business and corporate competition to get in the way.

There was a time when the Cold War was defined as being between Top Rank and Golden Boy Promotions, the company founded by Oscar De La Hoya after he departed from Top Rank, which as with Mayweather had promoted him from the outset. They had worked together in late 2004 for the final fight of the trilogy between Marco Antonio Barrera and Erik Morales.

Then came a duel over Manny Pacquiao, with both companies asserting promotional rights. When a settlement was announced in 2007, the promoters got together for a rematch between Pacquiao (Top Rank) and Barrera (Golden Boy). But the relationship remained frosty following the 2009 co-promotion in which Pacquiao knocked out Golden Boy’s Ricky Hatton.

 There was bad blood over a defamation lawsuit Manny Pacquiao had filed against Mayweather, Golden Boy and others regarding comments about Pacquiao and performance-enhancing drugs. And there was a battle over Nonito Donaire, who Golden Boy signed but who wound up back with Top Rank instead after some legal wrangling.

So when Golden Boy and Top Rank once again paired up for the 2011 bout between Yuriorkis Gamboa and Daniel Ponce De Leon, their chief executives commented on the potential rekindling of a relationship.

“We have opened up our channels of communications and that’s a good thing,” said Richard Schaefer, then the CEO of Golden Boy.

“We have had meetings, but until the fights are made it is silly to talk about them,” Arum had said.

But competition remained — over dates, over fighters and over their share of the boxing business. Given the size of their stables and the nature of the industry, these companies often chose to keep their bouts in-house or work with smaller co-promoters, lest the time and money invested into their own fighters end up in a loss that instead benefited their promotional rival.

It also didn’t help that Schaefer and Arum often were unfiltered and uncensored when speaking about each other, with more bad blood between them than between any of their boxers.

So when Golden Boy junior middleweight Erislandy Lara fought Top Rank 154-pounder Vanes Martirosyan in late 2012, it was on a Top Rank card, the result of a winning purse bid rather than any negotiations.

The same could be said for last year’s title fight between featherweights Vasyl Lomachenko and Gary Russell Jr. Lomachenko, who is signed with Top Rank, had been featured on HBO. Russell is signed with Haymon and had been working with Golden Boy, which won the purse bid and showcased the bout on Showtime.

There’s no longer a battle between Top Rank and Golden Boy. Schaefer left Golden Boy last year, and De La Hoya reasserted himself as owner of the company and directed cooperation for the sake of the fans. He also mended fences with HBO while having a falling out with Showtime.

And Haymon took nearly all of his fighters from Golden Boy, a wealth of stars who either were no longer under contract with the promoter or never had been so. He continues to work with Showtime, all while putting forth his “Premier Boxing Champions” venture on CBS, NBC, Spike, ABC, ESPN and Bounce.

Haymon continues to sign numerous boxers, shoring up his ranks so that he can have names in the fold for his various broadcasts, simultaneously decreasing the number of opponents available for fighters with other promoters. He also signed Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. last year, leading to a Top Rank lawsuit. Chavez will appear on a Haymon card on April 18 on Showtime.

Haymon, like other managers and promoters, has paths set out for his fighters. Collisions such as Lomachenko-Russell happen when mandated, and when such a fight is desired by the boxer himself and acceptable to Haymon et al.

That’s also why we can expect a bout between light heavyweight champion Adonis Stevenson and three-belt titleholder Sergey Kovalev to happen, finally, more than a year after Stevenson signed with Haymon, sought more money from HBO for a bout than HBO was willing to pay, and departed for the winning bidder in Showtime.

Kovalev’s team has since been able to steal away a pair of opponents Stevenson’s team had been eyeing: Bernard Hopkins and Jean Pascal. Kovalev beat both. Main Events also got the World Boxing Council to do something incredibly rare: place another sanctioning body’s titleholder in its own rankings and make him mandatory challenger to Stevenson. The fight is scheduled to go to purse bid this month.

Stevenson’s team has indicated that they want the Kovalev fight. That could happen by the end of the year, should Kovalev first defeat Nadjib Mohammedi, the mandatory challenger to one of his titles. Stevenson may end up taking a keep-busy bout as well this summer; he just outpointed Sakio Bika this past Saturday on PBC’s debut CBS broadcast.

After Mayweather-Pacquiao was announced, Arum said he’d be open to working with Haymon again. Most talk of a thaw should still be seen as hot air.

That’s because what’s good for Top Rank and Golden Boy and Main Events isn’t necessarily what’s good for Haymon. Boxers will continue to be spotlighted on the HBO family of networks, or on Showtime and the PBC medley of channels, but not both.

Kathy Duva of Main Events — which promotes Kovalev and sued Haymon and others in 2014 — said last month that she could work with anyone, noting that her company got off the ground by suing the two largest promoters at the time, Don King and Bob Arum, as well as a pair of sanctioning bodies.

“We find a way to work with our enemies,” she said. “We have to.”

But as we saw when the Cold War was between Top Rank and Golden Boy, they didn’t have to. Haymon won’t have to unless he needs to.

This is a business. Companies and networks compete. And that means there are many fights we still won’t get, whether it’s the featherweight titleholders in Haymon’s stable against those fighting under Top Rank’s banner, or the myriad contenders and titleholders at 140, 147 and 154 who are with Haymon or Top Rank or Golden Boy.

There was even a report in the Montreal Journal last week saying that PBC will have its own title belts, seemingly confirming a rumor that had been going around since Haymon’s venture was getting off the ground.

That would be akin to the UFC having its own titles, allowing it to market itself to its wider audience as the go-to place for the best mixed martial arts, even if Bellator and other smaller domestic and international promoters also had fighters deserving of being in the conversation.

In 2013, there were still many great pairings on HBO and Showtime despite the Cold War. That’s what boxing fans will need to hope for in 2015 and for the rest of the foreseeable future.

Haymon has a huge stable and a financial interest in giving casual viewers a reason to tune-in. We prefer that to be done with competitive clashes, but audiences will also latch on to heroes and villains, following them specifically.

The other promoters may be in a strange position of working with each other to make fights while also competing for the limited number of dates on the remaining networks. Or they may be forced to try something new, as Top Rank is doing with its new series of shows on truTV, the station formerly known as Court TV.

Boxing’s Cold War had long been marked by what couldn’t happen thanks to a lack of collaboration. But competition can also breed innovation, and it can force those competing to step up the quality of their product.

Professional wrestling hit its peak during the Monday Night Wars of the 1990s. The real Cold War, while frightening for what it represented, nevertheless led to huge leaps in technology and discovery.

Hopefully that in a way will be the result in boxing as well. Hopefully boxing’s cold wars will foster a space race.

The 10 Count

1.  If Adonis Stevenson expected to become the next big star in Montreal and Quebec City after super middleweight Lucian Bute and light heavyweight Jean Pascal, then the attendance figures sure aren’t backing that up.

Stevenson’s win over Bika this past Saturday came in front of an announced crowd of 4,729, and there’s no way of telling if that number was accurate and how many of those were discounted or given away.

That was the lowest number yet for Stevenson since he won the 175-pound championship, per some Googling.

When Stevenson knocked out Chad Dawson in 76 seconds in June 2013, he did so in front of what was either a little bit more than 6,000 fans at the Bell Centre in Montreal or somewhere closer to 7,000, depending on which report you look at. Months later, promoter Yvon Michel told boxing writer Steve Kim that the attendance had been “about 4,000.”

Stevenson’s first defense of that championship, against Tavoris Cloud in Montreal in September 2013, had an announced attendance of 9,122. That was the highest number for him. It’s been going downward ever since.

He then beat Tony Bellew at the Pepsi Coliseum in Quebec City in November 2013, doing so in front of an announced crowd of 8,540.

Stevenson’s decision win over Andrzej Fonfara in May 2014 in Montreal had an announced attendance of 6,342.

His knockout of Dmitry Sukhotsky this past December in Quebec City had a crowd of “approximately 6,200.”

And the Bika bout, again, had 4,729.

2.  It likely took a decent amount of money for PBC to put on this past Saturday’s card in Quebec City, from the airtime purchased on CBS to the purses for the fighters themselves to the cost of renting the venue.

That makes the low attendance even more notable. Ditto for how few commercials there were for anything other than PBC fighters and some CBS programming. I don’t recall seeing anything else beyond a couple spots for the “Game of War” video game.

“Love these boxing ‘bloggers’ complaining about a lack of commercials? Hysterical. Go back to Mom's basement,” said Scott Gulbransen, head of global digital content for Haymon Boxing and Premier Boxing Champions, tweeting 24 minutes into the broadcast.

I’m not sure which writers or bloggers inspired Gulbransen’s tweet, nor can I speak for the motivation of those who raised his ire. But I suppose that many boxing observers are paying attention to the amount of commercial content because they are following whether this PBC venture can pick up the financial support it will need from advertisers and sponsors.

It was impossible not to notice the repetition of seeing and hearing the same thing from Danny Garcia, Lamont Peterson, Peter Quillin, Leo Santa Cruz, Omar Figueroa and Deontay Wilder, over and over and over again in lieu of commercials.

It is still incredibly early. Perhaps PBC is hoping that good ratings for its shows will draw advertisers down the line, and in the meantime will run spots reminding viewers of upcoming programming.

(Stevenson at least has another source of revenue from the Canadian broadcast.)

3.  The less said about Brent Stover’s post-fight interview with Adonis Stevenson and his labeling of Stevenson’s win over Sakio Bika as “epic,” the better.

Fortunately, the in-fight analysis from boxer Paulie Malignaggi and trainer Virgil Hunter was very good. Malignaggi, who’s been a mainstay of Showtime broadcasts and other boxing programming, was complemented well by Hunter, who was new to the role. Their back-and-forth discussing technical aspects of the action was a highlight of the show and added to what we were seeing in the ring.

Hunter did have a bad habit of talking over blow-by-blow announcer Kevin Harlan, a broadcast veteran who wisely got out of the way and let the expert speak.

4.  Speaking of Virgil Hunter, his star fighter, super middleweight champion Andre Ward, announced last week that he would finally be returning to the ring on June 20.

By the time Ward steps between those ropes in Oakland, it will have been 19 months and four days since his last bout, a unanimous decision win over Edwin Rodriguez on Nov. 16, 2013. Ward’s only fought twice since winning the “Super Six” tournament at the end of 2011; his other appearance was a September 2012 stoppage of Chad Dawson.

No opponent had been announced yet. We shouldn’t expect it to be anyone anywhere near the top of the 168-pound division.

That should allow Ward to shake off some of the rust he accumulated during time away from the ring due to an injury and then his prolonged attempt to extricate himself from his now-former promoter, Goossen Promotions. Ward has since signed with Jay-Z’s Roc Nation Sports.

Ward may well have been staying in shape, training and getting some sparring in. It’ll be interesting to see how much of an affect the time away had on him, be it positive or negative. He was 29 when he beat Rodriguez. He’s now 31, still in his prime but, well, having wasted 19 months of it.

Sometimes that will be to a fighter’s detriment. Sometimes, however, that can be good for athletes who wear their bodies down with the grind of training and making weight and being punched.

It’s just a shame that one of the best boxers in the sport has done so little after hitting such heights with the Super Six tournament and the victory over Dawson.

5.  On a March 27 broadcast of boxing on Telemundo, a 2-4 fighter named Marvin Jones had his cell phone fall from his trunks. Shortly thereafter, his 1-1 opponent, Ramon Nicolas, knocked Jones out.

Footage of that can be seen here:

Per TMZ Sports: “Jones [said] he was listening to music before the fight and tucked the phone into his shorts. When he headed to the ring, he pulled out his headphones ... but not the phone.”

The phone apparently was fine. Perhaps it was in a casing. If so, then unlike Jones, it has protected itself at all times.

Then again, Jones may very well have been knocked out anyway. That’s how all of his losses have come.

And that could’ve led to an even more embarrassing moment had he pocket dialed someone, only for them to hear him being counted out.

6.  Several reports last week noted that Manny Pacquiao has once again been dealing with cramps during training camp, and that he went to sports physicians who prescribed him a cream that comes at a cost of $1,800 per bottle.

I’m not the most religious person in the world, but I feel as if there was a warning about this kind of thing in the Old Testament. I’m guessing right now that those doctors treating Pacquiao are laughing their way to the bank — and are worshipping Pacquiao’s golden calves.

7.  Boxers Behaving Goodly: Last week, after a light heavyweight prospect named Michael Seals signed a contract with adviser Al Haymon, the undefeated 32-year-old handed out bags of fast food to a gathering throng of people in his community, according to a video posted on his Facebook page. (A hat tip to Fightnews, which noted this story.)

“So I was asked how I wanted to celebrate my accomplishment. Party? Nah. Club? Nah. Frivolous spending? Nah,” he wrote. “I thought to myself, ‘Man, God is really blessing me right now. All I could think about was being a blessing in someone else's life today.’ ”

Seals turned pro relatively late at 26 years old and has gone 19-0 with 14 KOs against limited opposition.

He wasn’t the only Haymon light heavyweight handing food out to the needy last week. Prior to Adonis Stevenson’s bout with Sakio Bika this past Saturday, the 175-pound champ volunteered at a homeless shelter and food kitchen in Quebec City, according to a news release from his publicists.

“Besides serving food, Stevenson and his team also gave away tickets, autographed posters and posed for photos with people in the shelter and some of his local fans,” the news release said.

8.   Boxers Behaving Badly update: Antonio Escalante’s 2014 saw him arrested four times while driving intoxicated in Texas, with the final arrest coming after he’d already pleaded guilty in two of those cases. Now he’s pleaded guilty to the remaining two cases, according to the El Paso Times.

That has led to a harsher sentence — eight years of probation, which is much longer than the 18 months that had been handed down after pleading guilty the first time.
“As part of the probation, Escalante will have to report to his probation officer once a week, attend the drug court program once a week, attend one individual and two group counseling sessions each week and will have home visits from probation officers four times a week,” the article said.

One of the cases involved Escalante being accused of “driving while intoxicated with a child under 15 years of age,” according to online court records. He also was cited in May 2014 for allegedly having a child not secured by a safety seat. Online court records list similar accusations over the years: an unrestrained child in 2004, driving under the influence in 2006, driving without a valid license on multiple occasions in 2009 and 2010. Some of these cases wound up dismissed. He’s also had alleged license/license plate violations this year as well.

Escalante turned pro in 2003 and has largely fought in the 122-, 126- and 130-pound divisions,. Among his notable wins are victories over Cornelius Lock, Mike Oliver, Miguel Roman and Gary Stark Jr. His losses came to Jairo Sanchez early in his career, to Mauricio Pastrana in 2007, in back-to-back knockout losses to Daniel Ponce De Leon in 2010 and Alejandro Perez, in back-to-back stoppage losses to Rocky Juarez in 2012 and Robert Marroquin in 2013 — and, most recently, a third-round technical knockout loss to Miguel Berchelt on Oct. 11. That dropped him to 29-7 with 20 KOs. 

The El Paso Times article says Escalante is scheduled to return to the ring on April 18.

9.  Last week’s column wondered whether Omar Figueroa’s recent arrest on an open warrant in an otherwise old DWI case from 2012 would affect his upcoming bout against Ricky Burns, which headlines the “Premier Boxing Champions” card on CBS on May 9.

It won’t. Figueroa has a court date scheduled for June 18 and won’t have any other hearings between now and then. And this past Saturday’s PBC show on CBS included several repeated video spots in which Figueroa identified himself and mentioned his fight on May 9.

10.  Speaking of PBC, the announcing crew working this upcoming Saturday’s show on NBC will include famed broadcasters Bob Costas, Al Michaels and Marv Albert working “together for the first time ever,” according to a news release’s excited proclamation sent out last week.

“Legendary announce trio has combined to work 25 Super Bowls, 25 NBA Finals, 23 Olympics and 19 World Series,” it noted.

Costas will present a feature on the history of boxing in New York, it said, while Michaels will again be the host and Albert will do blow-by-blow announcing, supported by Sugar Ray Leonard, B.J. Flores and Kenny Rice.

Apparently this is big news.  But if you can't get excited about guys who are 63, 70 and 73 years old working together, you must not have watched WrestleMania 31 either…

“Fighting Words” appears every Monday on krikya360.com. Pick up a copy of David’s book, “Fighting Words: The Heart and Heartbreak of Boxing,” at or internationally at . Send questions/comments via email at fightingwords1@gmail.com