By Bart Barry-
Saturday or Sunday somewhere in Australia, Manny Pacquiao will fight an Australian welterweight named Jeff “The Hornet” Horn in a match televised by ESPN. While Horn is exactly the sort of fighter one expects to see on ESPN, Pacquiao, even at this late stage, is an extraordinary improvement. In its press release ESPN indicates Pacman-Hornet will be privy to a full suite of the network’s promotional instruments. This sort of immersion commitment should prove beneficial to Pacquiao’s promoter, Top Rank, and may even prove beneficial to our beloved sport as a whole.
Hand it to Top Rank, the outfit understands how to stretch an attraction longterm. Imagine if Manny Pacquiao’d stayed with Murad Muhammad or Gary Shaw or Golden Boy Promotions all those years ago – would Top Rank even be in business any longer?
Yes, absolutely. Nothing about its current business model or the model of its last decade would resemble its current business model, but Top Rank would be in business and profitable because it is institutionally better at what it does than anyone else in boxing. While its founder occasionally plays a crazy old uncle on TV the company moves conservatively and reliably follows reliable revenue streams.
Yes, it once built a pay-per-view infrastructure to promote its fighters after they were signed to large contracts but before HBO might supplement those contracts, a broadcasting arm that monetized Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. without improving him more than an iota or two, but even that riskylooking model was about recovering its investment someday from Time Warner (did a Top Rank a-side ever lose a main event on Top Rank PPV?). Years ago even Pacquiao fought on Top Rank PPV to keep him busy before politics did but then returned for a fouryear stint on HBO pay-per-view before Top Rank moved him, for a single fight, to Showtime and then back to HBO pay-per-view for a fouryear promotion of his eventual loss to Floyd Mayweather. When the fights were too risible to be promotional themes themselves – Joshua Clottey, Shane Mosley, Brandon Rios, Chris Algieri – Top Rank made the venue or broadcaster the theme, encouraging a suspension of disbelief like: I know this won’t be any good, but seeing a boxing ring in a football stadium, or a Chinese casino, or on the child affiliate of an American terrestrial broadcaster, why, to miss those things would be to ensure a lifetime of regret!
Where Arum was improvisational, relying on experience and charisma to propel him through whatever exotica the week’s announcement needed, his step-son, Todd DuBoef, was more strategic, talking about a concept he called Brand of Boxing, from whose spirit Al Haymon’s PBC borrowed liberally a few years later. The one enormous difference between the two visions was talent; Top Rank has a collective talent for spotting potential, developing it and matching it in a properly violent spectacle that is historic; PBC does not. DuBoef assumed if boxing’s popularity ascended his company would benefit because it had the best matchmaking, while Haymon assumed saturation was a better ploy – especially with someone else’s money. PBC was more innovative than Top Rank in its gambit but its founder’s enduring contempt for the very media whose platforms he expected to saturate kept his model insulated from what negative feedback journalism freely offers and thus vulnerable to what expensive feedback shareholders do.
The common wisdom in architecture is that there are but two ways to avoid catastrophic mistakes when building something: Get lucky, or make many tiny mistakes. PBC, whose blueprint began with a figurehead who does not conduct interviews, made the same mistakes over and over because it set itself in professional conflict with its critics, ensuring no small mistakes would be noticed till they became catastrophic ones.
To switch metaphors, if PBC is a long, well-set banquet table with one man at the head and nobody else in the room, Top Rank is more of a family style buffet with people arguing at every table and tables arguing with other tables. Where Haymon refuses interviews, Arum spars with members of the media routinely. Top Rank makes thousands of tiny mistakes and corrects them – if it lacks PBC’s derringdo it also lacks PBC’s ideological purity. Top Rank was on free-television decades ago then went to cable, Top Rank was on HBO for years then went to Showtime, Top Rank was on premium cable for decades now returns to basic cable – all the while Arum makes enemies of last year’s friends and friends of last decade’s enemies and enemies of their friends and friends of their enemies.
Were Pacquiao-Horn scheduled for Friday Night Fights it would be no better than an admission Pacquiao-Horn couldn’t do 50,000 buys in the U.S., and all the details to follow whatever details they followed wouldn’t matter – just Arum making noise again with whatever materials he can bang together. But then one hears the weighin will happen live on SportsCenter, an institution that quite rightly ignored its network’s Fright Night Fights franchise for however long Joe and Teddy were shouting about the abominable judging of what meaningless fights happened in between Just for Men commercials, and it does bring pause.
Whatever one opines of ESPN’s prepositional approach to hyperbolic coverage – on SportsCenter, for instance, this would be “the first column ever written, on a Chromebook, in the month of June, by an Irish-American writer wearing a pink Kangol, in a San Antonio Starbucks, during a rainstorm, for a website named after the previous duration of a championship prizefight” – the network owns a fantastic share of what thoughts happen in the minds of American male consumers, ages 18-34. As a fighter Pacquiao has been what the kids call “washed” since Juan Manuel Marquez snatched his soul 4 1/2 years ago, but as a brand? Goodness, ESPN has vended much, much sillier things.
HBO hasn’t had its heart or soul in boxing for a good long while, and if that trend showed any signs of reversal Top Rank would not have begun its ESPN overtures when it did. After bemoaning the cycle for a few years, Top Rank now accelerates it – leaving HBO with Tom Loeffler, Oscar De La Hoya and Kathy Duva to sustain an entire boxing ecosystem.
What’s that – a pick for Pacquiao-Horn? No, that’s OK.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
