First they get rid of softcore porn, now this:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/27/sports/hbo-boxing.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/27/sports/hbo-boxing.html
-
Get involved.
We want your input!
Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.
After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.
After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/
Thanks in advance and have fun!
RadioDiscussions Administrators
HBO to drop boxing after 45 years
- Thread starter mvcg66b3r
- Start date
One of the reasons I have never subscribed to HBO is because of boxing. They used to broadcast a lot of it and it clashed with my personal opinion that boxing should, like horse/dog racing be banned. I never understood why some people considered it "sport" for one person to bash another's brains out and then both of them wind up brainless and penniless into their old age. Even "The Greatest One" wound up a mental mushroom. Makes no sense.
The article mentions the British promotional company Matchroom Sports. American television could learn a lot, IMO, from Barry Hearn's brilliant operation, which has raised the TV profile and public enthusiasm for not only boxing but darts and snooker in the UK. Matchroom creates events with plenty of hype and flash as well as great skill in building up the personalities of the featured performers.
Not going to get into it with LandTuna here. My life as a sports spectator (and, in the case of racing, bettor) would be much poorer without boxing and horse racing.
"“Our audience research informs us that boxing is no longer a determinant factor for subscribing to HBO.”
Makes sense. Long form drama has taken over HBO. It doesn't need to be all things to all people.
They could move the sports to TNT. That would make more sense than what's there now.
Makes sense. Long form drama has taken over HBO. It doesn't need to be all things to all people.
They could move the sports to TNT. That would make more sense than what's there now.
Having spent quite a bit of time over the past 30 years in Merry Olde England I can say from first hand perspective their audience is vastly different than America's. Programs like bird watching, darts and cricket would die on the vine over here in the Colonies due to the audience falling completely asleep. Years ago bowling used to be featured on Wide World of Sports but I have not seen bowling in several decades - and for the same reason. And billiards/snooker? Fuggetaboutit! I always thought it was a hoot that Englishmen (and others) criticize American football as slow.
My comment regarding horse and dog racing was aimed at the animals who are medicated/mistreated, and sometimes pay with their lives, for "entertainment". It shows just how far humans need to go to be humane.
Last year, BBC America brought the insanity that is the World Darts Championship to American TV for the first time. If they have the rights this year and you have BBC America on your TV, I suggest you watch the schedule during the weeks around Christmas and New Year's and check it out. Fans dress in costumes, chant and sing, and some of the top players are tattooed and Mohawk-coiffed. Boring, it is not.
HBO used to be able to source really good matches. They carried the Tyson-Douglas match for example. Now, the really big draws are all on PPV. It doesn't help that Boxing's audience is getting consistently smaller. It appears HBO made a logical decision to drop it. The real question is if what they replace it with will draw as much.
HBO got Tyson-Douglas because it wasn't considered a competitive enough match to put on pay per view. In Muhammad Ali's time, his big fights were on closed circuit in movie theaters. His lesser fights were on network TV. Same with Joe Frazier. I remember watching both men beat overmatched opponents on "free" TV, but when they met each other, you had to pay. Sometimes, you got big upsets in those TV fights -- Ali's loss to Ken Norton comes to mind (and Norton might have been the best network-TV opponent Ali had) -- but most of the time, the opponent was a guy like Jean-Pierre Coopmans or Terry Daniels and the fight went just the way you'd expect it to go.
Last edited:
Back in the day when my neighbors were using homebrew microwave dishes to steal HBO from a nearby relay tower the boxing matches were a big deal.
Now I probably have 75 sports channels in my package.
Now I probably have 75 sports channels in my package.
Last edited:
Sounds like a cross between a circus and "professional" wrestling. And about as interesting.
Not Surprising HBO will say this is about going after Netflix over audiences.
Any legitimate tv/cable historian will note that the expansion of the bare bones HBO was born upon professional boxing. So this is somewhat noteworthy here in 2018. Of course, times change and the product and its owners are entirely different today. But the irony is indeed in place here.
Last edited:
It brought much of its downfall on itself, with its "alphabet soup" of sanctioning organizations, each with its own champions; its fracturing of the classic weight divisions into "lights" and "supers" and "juniors," making it impossible for anyone to really follow the whole sport; its blatant corruption; and a drift by society at large to look on boxing as a brutal relic of times past. It's hard to see the clock turning back on any of these, although cleaning up the game could happen if all concerned were sincere about doing so, which they have never been.
Ironically, HBO (and later Showtime) didn't help either. While the advent of cable brought weekly shows back to TV, and introduced new boxers to the public, the fighters and fights people wanted to see were squirreled away on a pay channel many people couldn't see, either because they weren't interested in cable or weren't fans of HBO/Showtime's other programming (largely movies) and couldn't justify paying extra each month just to watch an occasional fight.
The rise of mixed martial arts shows that, despite their risk of injury and/or permanent disability, combat sports are still marketable and can attract viewers outside the cigar-chomping, hat-wearing, paunchy white male demographic that has largely died off. So I don't think boxing will ever disappear, unless the voices speaking against it out of concern for the long-term health of the participants succeed in getting bans imposed by legislative bodies.
A lot of those additional title belts came about because of network TV wanting the ability to market more championship fights. Ring magazine basically dealt with this by awarding their belt to the true champion. Further, the unification of belts often led to compelling bouts over the years. Boxing was, and is, a sport that attracted tough kids who grew up in poverty. Say what you want, but the desperation that drove many to see taking blows to the head as a good alternative to their lot in life is largely gone from the United States, which is a blessing. Many great boxers still hail from here, but more from Mexico and Russia in recent years which reduced the interest of American audiences. Further complicating the problem were the changes in Olympic boxing making it much more different than the professional sport. This led to good Olympic boxers being ill suited for the professional matches which dried up a key developmental source for the sport.
Boxing indeed did help put HBO on the map, but times do change, and this decision is hard to challenge.
Boxing indeed did help put HBO on the map, but times do change, and this decision is hard to challenge.
I have a first cousin, Lee Groves, whose career as a punch counter for HBO, Cinemax and other outlets has made him a name in the boxing game, and has taken him all over the world multiple times. He's written a huge first book, with another one coming out soon. He could not disagree more with LandTuna, but to each his or her own.
While I envy your cousin's opportunity to see the world, I'm not a big fan of his job or the need for it. Boxing, as the most elemental of sports, doesn't lend itself to statistics well. Boxers don't work on a "punch count" similar to baseball's pitch count, which I despise. They aren't limited to a certain number of punches per round, nor do they automatically win or lose at the point in the fight that they land or receive their 100th punch of the bout. Boxers who land more punches than their opponents don't always win the fight, and often justifiably so. The "power punches" statistic is, on the surface, useful, but then you have to remember that one such punch can end a fight at any time, no matter how many of them the boxer has landed previously.
To me, counting punches is a true "missing the forest for the trees" approach to boxing. I'll have to see if I can locate a copy of Mr. Groves' book, because I'm curious about what sort of perspective on boxing a punch counter could offer.
Boxing (other than the Olympic variety) and martial "arts" are the only so-called sports with the primary object to cause intentional injury to the opponent. It is no "game".
While punch counts aren't the same to boxing as pitch counts are to baseball, they still provide statistical value to show the relative activity, in a round of one boxer as compared to the other. For in fight analysis, they are a useful tool and, because the count cannot be automated, relied on people, like Mr. Groves, who could intensely both focus on the bout and record the punches. I would dispute any notion that the stat had no value.
- Status