Editor’s note: This article was originally published on USAToday.com on Nov. 7, the day Luis Ortiz stopped Alexander Flores on Fox.
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Errol Spence Jr. remembers his father taking him to Dallas-area barbershops during the 1990s to watch Lennox Lewis heavyweight fights. Lewis’ bouts for the heavyweight championship against Evander Holyfield in 1999 stick out.
That feeling of community, watching with and surrounded by others who loved boxing, fueled Spence’s passion for the sport. And it’s why he’s part of a group of boxers who are trying to grow the sport to a wider and younger audience through a traditional medium: network television.
Spence, the current welterweight champion who fights under the Premier Boxing Champions (PBC), is quick to acknowledge television’s power. In 2016, his post-Olympics bout on NBC against Leonard Bundu that peaked around 6 million viewers thanks to the popular lead-in and settled in closer to 5 million.
“I would never have hit that number,” Spence told USA TODAY Sports by phone, “if I was fighting on pay-per-view.”
That’s why the PBC hopes its deal with Fox – featuring bouts on the network, Fox Sports 1 and pay-per-view – will not only bring ratings, but an increased popularity while gaining new fans. On Saturday, Fox will air Luis “King Kong” Ortiz against Alexander “The Great” Flores in a 10-round main event. Undercard bouts start at 8 p.m. EST.
Spence knows asking fight fans to cough up $70-80 for a pay-per-view bout amid the economic stresses of a global pandemic seems like a big ask. That’s why Spence, who will fight a Fox pay-per-view fight later this month against Danny Garcia at AT&T Stadium in Dallas, said he wants a fight in the near future to air on Fox as a sign of gratitude to his fans.
“I do want have a showcase fight where I’m fighting on network television in front of everybody because I feel like that’s where a lot of my fans will see me fight,” he said.
Shawn Porter, another welterweight who fought Spence last September (a Spence victory by decision), is confident the PBC’s partnership with Fox will pay dividends down the road.
“It’s kind of our job to reintroduce the sport,” Porter told USA TODAY Sports.
He’s confident it won’t mean the death of pay-per-view or a loss of purse money for fighters.
If a fighter has a certain number of fights on network TV, the popularity gained there could translate to pay-per-view purchases.
“People know what they get when they see someone like Shawn Porter in the ring,” Porter said. Footing the bill becomes justifiable because “it’s worth it. They’re going to be entertained. I think that really is the key to the equation, to get the wider audience and make them familiar with who the fighters are for this generation.”
Count Lennox Lewis – who is an analyst on Fox broadcasts alongside fellow analyst Joe Goossen, blow-by-blow announcer Brian Kenny and reporter Heidi Androl – as someone who also subscribes to the theory that fighting on Fox will ultimately help PBC boxers. Lewis has good reason to believe that as someone who fought on network TV as an up-and-comer. It offers younger, inexperienced fighters the chance to showcase talent without the pressure of pay-per-view. And the fans will remember who fought on TV when it comes time to pony up for a pay-per-view event.
“They’re like ‘Oh, I remember seeing this guy’s third fight, fourth fight,’” Lewis told USA TODAY Sports. “Now, when he gets to 20 fights and a pay-per-view, that’s when you start telling your friends about him.”
It worked out for Lewis, who said fighting on accessible TV brought his popularity to the “level of the streets,” instead of those who can pay for subscription-based networks like Showtime and HBO, which took over the boxing scene in the early 21st century.
“I wasn’t one of the guys who went for the money, per se,” Lewis said. “I’d rather more people see me than less people, so I’ll take the lesser money.”
Porter, who has fought on Fox properties at least five times, said he’s seen his popularity rise among non-boxing fans. They might first think he’s a pro basketball player, “but for me, it was like ‘OK, whatever is going to be the best for the sport in the long run, that’s what I’m willing to do.’ I did understand network television would give us the opportunity to have eyes on us.”
Where did boxing’s eyes go?
Throughout the 20th century, boxing was a quintessential American sport. The sport’s popularity receded with the emergence of professional leagues (NBA, NFL, MLS, etc.), and the world’s best athletes began heading for the field or court instead of the ring. A 2006 Gallup poll found that two percent of Americans considered boxing their favorite sport.
“The single biggest super-vitamin that boxing would need to change the whole thing is if NBC put Olympic boxing back on the air on one of their prime networks,” former HBO boxing executive Seth Abraham told USA TODAY Sports.
That’s how boxing forged ahead beginning in 1960, with Cassius Clay – later Muhammad Ali – in Rome. Then there were the Spinks brother in Montreal in 1976.
“When those men turned professional, they already had tremendous exposure to the non-boxing audience to the sports audience, beyond the boxing audience,” Abraham said.
But with Olympics rights under NBC now, the network has shied away from airing boxing during key time slots, opting for swimming or gymnastics instead. At HBO, Abraham negotiated with longtime NBC Sports chairman Dick Ebersoll ahead of the 1996 Games in Atlanta to air boxing on the channel live and in primetime during the Olympics. Ebersoll did not want to surrender Olympic exclusivity, Abraham said.
A “LeBron James of boxing, a Tiger Woods of boxing” could alter the conversation, he added, but such an emergence seems unlikely.
“I applaud what Fox is trying to do, but that’s not going to change the dynamic,” Abraham said. “If you just maintain the status quo, boxing will continue to shrink. At HBO, it shrunk so much that it just disappeared. It was painful to watch. Or, in this case, painful not to watch.”
HBO officially no longer airs boxing as of last summer. In addition to Showtime and Fox, ESPN has a partnership with a different management company, Top Rank, that has yielded recent ratings successes. Last month’s world title unification fight between Vasiliy Lomachenko and Teofimo Lopez peaked at nearly 3 million viewers. The network said it was the most viewed boxing telecast across all cable networks in 2019 and 2020.
That’s music to Bill Wanger’s ears. The Fox sports executive vice president of programming told USA TODAY Sports the network saw a ratings increase of about 12% from 2018 to 2019 before the pandemic slowed things down, as it has for most sports. From 2014 to 2019, Wanger said, the numbers of hours of boxing on network TV increased dramatically, from two to 26.
Fox and the PBC agreed to a new four-year deal in 2018 that includes 26 fights per year (12 on FS1, 10 on Fox and four pay-per-view). To match ESPN’s ratings, though, Wanger realizes Fox may have to bring title fights from behind the pay-per-view curtain.
“We basically tier everything,” Wanger said. “The PBC has such a wide stable of top fighters, it’s not hard making those fights. And as we start getting out of this pandemic and ramping back up, I think you’ll start seeing some of those belt (fights) on Fox.”
Tim Smith, vice president of communication of the PBC, said all of the group’s top fighters have or will fight on network TV. Former heavyweight champion, Deontay Wilder (another PBC fighter), fought on NBC in 2015 for a title defense that peaked around 3 million viewers.
“They want a big stage,” he told USA TODAY Sports, “and (network TV) provides a big stage.”
The PBC, feeling that its talent was underexposed during the earlier part of last decade, initially bought their own network time on a variety of networks, including NBC, Spike and ESPN. Two years ago, though, the PBC and Fox ironed out a more exclusive deal that will stretch into 2022.
“I think one of the positive things about this is that when you’re only programming to boxing fans, that’s a very finite audience,” Smith said. “But when you’re on a network, you’re programming to sports fans. That’s a wider net, and when you cast a wider net, you get more fans.
“You want to see that these guys are reaching a certain audience. You want a younger audience as well.”
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