An oral history of The Rise & Fall of the HBO Boxing Empire

This is a truncated version of the Oral history of The Rise & Fall of the HBO Boxing Empire. The complete version will appear in next month’s digital issue of The Ring.

It was the Roman Empire of boxing. It lasted a ripe 45 years. It spanned global changes, political changes, technology changes, covering an ever-changing sport where yesterday they were lying, and today they are telling the truth.

HBO Boxing always told the truth. It did so in the brutal, direct way world champion fighters do. HBO Boxing bridged five decades, from 1973 to 2018. It brought all-time greats, live riots and “Fan Man” into the living rooms of fight fans throughout the world. The production was cutting edge. The broadcast crews became iconic. Boxing fans knew their voices and faces as they did the famous fighters they broadcast. It put on lavish displays for the tarnished sport of boxing, making sure you knew every time HBO World Championship Boxing arrived it came with a Super Bowl ambience. Championship Boxing produced spinoffs like Boxing After Dark and KO Nation, while HBO Boxing itself spun off to TVKO, the pay-per-view delivery division of HBO Boxing, debuting in 1991 with the Evander Holyfield-George Foreman fight.

This month marks the five-year anniversary when one of boxing’s greatest staples came to an unexpected halt.

RingTV went back and spoke to many of the people who were instrumental in the rise and sustained excellence of HBO Boxing, and the handful still there when the fall came in 2018.

HBO Boxing had a few Julius Caesars, probably the most prominent Hall of Famer Seth Abraham. It had its Octavians, like fellow Hall of Famers Lou DiBella and Jim Lampley, and producer extraordinaire Ross Greenburg, a BWAA Taub Award winner who should be in the Hall of Fame himself. Though in talking to many who were associated with HBO Boxing, it may not have had a Romulus Augustus, the last Roman emperor. Many, regrettably, place that label on Peter Nelson, the Harvard-educated 37-year-old standing HBO sports executive vice-president when the fall of HBO Boxing came. Nelson took the heat when the curtain crashed, though it may not have been his fault.

The last HBO Boxing telecast came on Saturday, December 8, 2018, featuring Cecilia Braekhus beating Aleksandra Magdziak Lopes by unanimous decision to retain her unified welterweight championship. It resonated because it was HBO Boxing, the end of an era, despite taking place before a scant crowd at the StubHub Center, in Carson, California. Lampley gave a tearful, final sendoff with his hands shaking as he left his indelible mark on an institution.

This is an oral history by those who were there for the rise and fall of HBO Boxing, accelerated by AT&T buying Time Warner, HBO’s parent company, in an $85.4 billion deal in 2016 that took 18 months to complete.

Seth Abraham, at HBO from 1978-2000 and former President of Time Warner Sports: I was actually the first president of Time Warner Sports, from January 1990 to September of 2000, originally hired by David Meister. David and I worked together at the office of baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn. David left to run HBO Sports, and he approached me in early 1977 and asked, ‘How would you like to come and work for me at HBO?’ For basically a year, I said no thanks. When I came in 1978, for about a year, maybe a year and a half, I reported to David. He eventually left to take another job inside HBO. Then, my titles began changing. David Meister technically was the first head of HBO Sports, but I was the first one with the title. The very first telecast, and part of HBO lore, was a movie starring Paul Newman called, ‘Sometimes a Great Notion.’ The second program on HBO was on November 8, 1972, a New York Rangers-Vancouver Canucks hockey game. The very first fight was the ‘Thrilla In Manila,’ transmitted by HBO on close-circuit. That was a rebroadcast, not live. This was the dark ages, pre-beginnings of HBO Sports then, since there was no ESPN then, there was no Showtime, there was no FOX Sports, there was no FOX Network then. What HBO Sports was then was a collection of very disconnected, disjointed sports programming. It had no theme, it had no motif, it had no North Star. When David moved on to another division, I spent a fair amount of time thinking about what HBO Sport’s identity could be. It began with a process of elimination. HBO could not afford the NFL. Out. Could not afford Major League Baseball contracts. Out. Could not afford NHL contracts. Out. Could not afford any of the league sports. So now, we started to look at the gamut of individual sports. Gymnastics, figure skating, and then, then boxing.

Lou DiBella, at HBO 1989 to 2000 Vice President in Charge of Programming at HBO: I started as the lawyer for HBO East Coast original programming. I was supposed to have a job with the New York Yankees. I was to interview with George Steinbrenner, and I got a call from Steinbrenner’s secretary saying I was too young because I was 29 years-old and he didn’t want to hire a general counsel in his 20s. I got really upset when I was cancelled. Steinbrenner’s secretary said, ‘I don’t know if this helps you, but the guy who is going to be offered the job was going to be interviewing for HBO Sports.’ I was already a huge boxing fan. That day, I literally snuck into the HBO Building and hung out outside the general counsel’s office at HBO begging for an interview. He talked to me a few minutes and found me amusing, and he sent me to Seth Abraham. That was a Friday afternoon. The next Monday I got the job. I took a huge pay cut to take the job from the law firm where I was working. I was with very smart, ambitious f—ing people. And we were all young. Mark Taffet was in HBO’s financial area, and eventually worked for me. Ross Greenburg was great and had great people working for him. He was winning all sorts of Emmys. We were doing numbers like the Soprano’s and Sex in the City. Julius Caesar is an interesting analogy when it comes to Seth, because there were a lot of young smart people below him looking to take Seth’s position. I’ll admit it. I was ambitious. I wanted Seth’s job. When it became clear I wasn’t going to get it, I left. I appreciate Seth now. Everyone was jockeying to be the next guy. It becomes hard when you’re the boss. In 20-20 hindsight, I think Seth did a remarkable job managing very difficult, but talented people. We were all a handful, in fairness to Seth. I was a handful, I’ll admit. I could have done better managing relationships. There are things I could have done differently communicating. There is not a lot of what I would have done differently professionally. I’m going to be honest, I thought I was f—ing great at my job. A lot of what I did was forcing meaningful fights.

Abraham: As a kid, even in my career, I wasn’t a particular boxing fan. Of course, I followed Muhammad Ali. But I wasn’t a fan. Now I started to do a lot of research about boxing. I realized that no one owned boxing. You had rival organizations. You had rival promoters. You have individual champions. The more I read about boxing, no one really owned the sport of boxing. It was fragmented. I thought boxing would be an interesting place to put money and commitment. I started cancelling other sports on HBO, and started throwing overboard other programs, sports programs to be able to get enough money to really make a serious run at boxing. This is a thread that is going to be really, really important: My boss, then-HBO CEO Michael Fuchs, was an enormous sports fan, and an enormous boxing fan. When I sat in Michael’s office, I didn’t have to explain everything. He knew it. He got it instantly. Together, we were able to figure out how HBO could become the king of television boxing. Michael was my boss for 18 years. Together, and I do mean together, we were able to craft, as you would call it, the Roman Empire of boxing. HBO Boxing had many fathers. Was I one of the fathers, yes, but I need to be humble here. It wasn’t just me. Was I George Washington, no. It was an exact moment in time that this happened.

Ross Greenburg, at HBO from 1978 to 2011 and former president of HBO Sports from 2000 to 2011: I was the second employee of the HBO sports department and in 1985 I became the executive producer and president from 2000 to 2011. I came from ABC Sports, where I was a freelance assistant to the producer. I witnessed the Roone Arledge-style of sports producing, which was pretty revolutionary at the time. So when I got to HBO, Michael Fuchs was the president of programming and he was a real boxing fan. In the early years of HBO, Don King had come to HBO with his closed-circuit events Frazier-Foreman, and then Ali-Foreman. They were both broadcast on HBO. Since it had so few subscribers then, it was felt that wouldn’t impact the closed-circuit numbers. HBO started in its infancy with these mega events. Michael Fuchs saw there was an opening because the networks were getting out of boxing. I guess that was because the networks were having trouble selling advertising, and advertisers were buying rounds two through 15. Boxing was not conducive to selling ads, because you never knew if a fight would end in one round. That was a huge problem and price tags were getting pretty big. Michael Fuchs saw that opening. HBO couldn’t compete with the networks when it came to the NFL, NBA, MLB, but we could grab prize fights for much less dollars. In the late 1970s when I got there, I remember one of the early fights was the tripleheader featuring Leon and Michael Spinks. I produced Ray Leonard’s fight against Dick Eklund up in Boston, which was a pretty monumental moment in HBO boxing. Then, of course, Marvin Hagler came along and we signed a three-fight deal for a million dollars with Hagler. That really started the drum roll. But you could tell Ray was special. We knew Ray was not going to deny anyone a fight. The first big HBO fight was Leonard-Hearns I. It was a moment. I remember producing that fight. Sitting in the truck that night, Michael Fuchs came in, folded his arms and said, ‘Gentlemen, we’ve arrived!’