NO HOLDS BARRED

My latest piece, "Saudi-DAZN Deal, Feb. 22 Card, and the Monopolization of Boxing", is up on the No Holds Barred Patreon page.

Labels: Artur Beterbiev, boxing, Daniel Dubois, DAZN, Dmitry Bivol, Eddie Goldman, Joseph Parker, No Holds Barred, Saudi Arabia

My latest piece, "Don't Bring Your Crayons to Usyk-Joshua 2", is up on the No Holds Barred Patreon page.

Labels: Anthony Joshua, boxing, Crayola, crayons, DAZN, Eddie Goldman, homosexuality, human rights, Jeddah, LGBTQ, No Holds Barred, Oleksandr Usyk, Pride Month, Saudi Arabia

Labels: Amanda Serrano, DAZN, Eddie Goldman, Katie Taylor, No Holds Barred, women's boxing

My latest piece, "Taylor-Serrano Was A Classic, But ....", is up on the No Holds Barred Patreon page.

Labels: Amanda Serrano, boxing, DAZN, Eddie Goldman, Katie Taylor, No Holds Barred, Shakur Stevenson, Twitter

My latest piece, "Bed Bugs, Cockroaches, and Pay-Per-View", is up on the No Holds Barred Patreon page.

Labels: bed bugs, boxing, cockroaches, DAZN, Eddie Goldman, No Holds Barred, pay-per-view, PBC, ppv, Premier Boxing Champions

My latest piece, "Canelo vs. Saunders and the DAZN Dilemma", is up on the No Holds Barred Patreon page. A subscription is required to read it, so subscribe today to support independent journalism. The article is at https://www.patreon.com/posts/canelo-vs-and-50971964.

Labels: Billy Joe Saunders, boxing, DAZN, Eddie Goldman, No Holds Barred, Saul Canelo Alvarez

On this edition of No Holds Barred, host Eddie Goldman discusses the November 2 fight between Saul "Canelo" Alvarez and Sergey Kovalev, and the ill-conceived decision by streaming service DAZN to delay its start until after a UFC event on another platform was completed. This outraged many in boxing, as the Canelo-Kovalev fight only started after 1 AM Eastern Time. Also discussed are how this was a gross insult to the core audience of boxing fans DAZN has built in the U.S. for the past year, what this might mean for DAZN amidst the very competitive "streaming wars", and much much more.

(Photo of Canelo and Kovalev by Tom Hogan-Hoganphotos/Golden Boy.)

You can play or download No Holds Barred here and here. If one link does not work, please try another.

No Holds Barred is available at Google Play Music.

Also, No Holds Barred is available at Apple Podcasts.

You can also listen to No Holds Barred via Stitcher through iOS or Android devices or on the web here.

The PodOmatic Podcast Player app is available for free, both for Android at Google Play, and for iOS on the App Store.

The No Holds Barred theme song is called "The Heist", which is also available on iTunes by composer Ian Snow.

No Holds Barred is sponsored by:

The Catch Wrestling Alliance, resurrecting and promoting the sport of authentic catch-as-catch-can wrestling. The Catch Wrestling Alliance provides tournaments, seminars, and training as well as education about catch wrestling. Join the movement and keep real wrestling alive. For more information, go to CatchWrestlingAlliance.com.

Skullz Double-End Bags, the perfect bag for your combat sports training. Skullz Double-End Bags provide a realistic striking target, and help improve timing, distance, and hand and eye coordination. Hang it and hit it right out of the box! No pump required. For more information, go to SkullzDeBags.com.

Labels: boxing, DAZN, Eddie Goldman, No Holds Barred, Saul Canelo Alvarez, Sergey Kovalev, streaming

My article "Springtime for DAZN" is up on Hannibal Boxing, at https://hannibalboxing.com/springtime-for-dazn.

Labels: DAZN, Eddie Goldman, Hannibal Boxing, No Holds Barred

by Eddie Goldman

My latest piece, called "Why Anthony Joshua vs. Jarrell Miller Matters", is up. It was written before the Fury-ESPN-Top Rank deal was announced, and before Tuesday's trashy Joshua-Miller press conference, but has lots of analysis you won't see in the shill media. It can be read at https://hannibalboxing.com/why-anthony-joshua-vs-jarrell-miller-matters.

Labels: Anthony Joshua, boxing, DAZN, Deontay Wilder, Eddie Goldman, Jarrell Big Baby Miller, No Holds Barred, Tyson Fury

On this edition of No Holds Barred, host Eddie Goldman discusses the new Tyson Fury-ESPN-Top Rank agreement, what it says about and means for boxing and its TV and streaming deals, why not to expect the Fury-Wilder rematch any time soon, and why now the June 1 fight at Madison Square Garden between WBA super, IBF, and WBO heavyweight champ Anthony Joshua of the U.K. (22-0, 21 KOs) and challenger Jarrell "Big Baby" Miller of the U.S. (23-0-1, 20 KOs), which will be on DAZN in the U.S. and Sky Sports Box Office in the U.K., is the biggest fight in heavyweight boxing.

You can play or download No Holds Barred here and here. If one link does not work, please try another.

No Holds Barred is available at Google Play Music.

Also, No Holds Barred is available through iTunes.

You can also listen to No Holds Barred via Stitcher through iOS or Android devices or on the web here.

The PodOmatic Podcast Player app is available for free, both for Android at Google Play, and for iOS on the App Store.

The No Holds Barred theme song is called "The Heist", which is also available on iTunes by composer Ian Snow.

No Holds Barred is sponsored by:

The Catch Wrestling Alliance, resurrecting and promoting the sport of authentic catch-as-catch-can wrestling. The Catch Wrestling Alliance provides tournaments, seminars, and training as well as education about catch wrestling. Join the movement and keep real wrestling alive. For more information, go to CatchWrestlingAlliance.com.

Skullz Double-End Bags, the perfect bag for your combat sports training. Skullz Double-End Bags provide a realistic striking target, and help improve timing, distance, and hand and eye coordination. Hang it and hit it right out of the box! No pump required. For more information, go to SkullzDeBags.com.

Labels: Anthony Joshua, boxing, DAZN, Deontay Wilder, Eddie Goldman, ESPN, Jarrell Big Baby Miller, No Holds Barred, Showtime, Top Rank, Tyson Fury

On this edition of No Holds Barred, host Eddie Goldman previews the October 27 fight between Daniel Jacobs and Sergiy Derevyanchenko for the vacant IBF middleweight belt. This fight takes place at the Hulu Theater at Madison Square Garden, and will headline a card shown in the U.S. on HBO on its next-to-last boxing telecast.

We spoke with Daniel Jacobs, Sergiy Derevyanchenko, and promoters Eddie Hearn and Lou DiBella on this week's media conference call about this fight. We also discussed the possibility of creating a tournament to unify the various middleweight titles.

Before that, an analysis is given of why there are now five so-called middleweight world champions, and the obstacles to unification. Besides the usual suspects of the sanctioning bodies, the effect of these recently-signed big money TV and streaming deals in the U.S. in blocking the best from fighting the best is examined.

(Photo of Demetrius Andrade and Walter Kautondokwa, Ed Mulholland/Matchroom USA.)

You can play or download No Holds Barred here and here. If one link does not work, please try another.

No Holds Barred is available at Google Play Music.

Also, No Holds Barred is available through iTunes.

You can also listen to No Holds Barred via Stitcher through iOS or Android devices or on the web here.

The PodOmatic Podcast Player app is available for free, both for Android at Google Play, and for iOS on the App Store.

The No Holds Barred theme song is called "The Heist", which is also available on iTunes by composer Ian Snow.

No Holds Barred is sponsored by:

The Catch Wrestling Alliance, resurrecting and promoting the sport of authentic catch-as-catch-can wrestling. The Catch Wrestling Alliance provides tournaments, seminars, and training as well as education about catch wrestling. Join the movement and keep real wrestling alive. For more information, go to CatchWrestlingAlliance.com.

Skullz Double-End Bags, the perfect bag for your combat sports training. Skullz Double-End Bags provide a realistic striking target, and help improve timing, distance, and hand and eye coordination. Hang it and hit it right out of the box! No pump required. For more information, go to SkullzDeBags.com.

Labels: boxing, Daniel Jacobs, DAZN, Demetrius Andrade, Eddie Goldman, ESPN, Fox, Gennady Golovkin, Jermall Charlo, middleweights, No Holds Barred, Saul Canelo Alvarez, Sergiy Derevyanchenko, Showtime

by Eddie Goldman

The critters who run boxing have made an art and a science of emptying the wallets of the sport's fans better than any knife-wielding, mask-wearing robber. For years they have convinced a small but declining section of the public to pay, pay, and pay again for their "must-see" and "great" fights, including several declared to be "the fight of the century".

You could once watch boxing on TV for free or listen to it on the radio in the U.S. several nights a week. There were far fewer programming choices in those days of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, than there are now.

Even then the wheels were in motion for colossal rip-offs. From exclusively showing major fights in movie theaters for inflated prices from the 1940s to the 1970s and after, and to hiding them behind the paywalls of premium cable and pay-per-view when access to those became widespread enough, the lords of boxing managed to enrich themselves while taking boxing from a major mainstream sport into a niche venture whose top fighters were unknown to succeeding generations. The top boxers used to be household names, and all sports fans knew who the heavyweight champion of the world was, especially since in the past there was usually just one. Pay-per-view took care of that inconvenience to the promoters' and networks' capital accumulation.

Oh yes, there were a few breakout stars during this pay-per-view period, such as Mike Tyson, Oscar De La Hoya, Floyd Mayweather, and, to a degree in some places, Saul "Canelo" Alvarez. But just ask people who are not in AARP who Roy Jones Jr., Bernard Hopkins, Andre Ward, and the Klitschkos are. If they are not dedicated boxing fans, you will likely get answers ranging from basketball players to indicted co-conspirators in the Mueller investigation.

But even more than the damage caused by the cancerous growth of sanctioning bodies, titles, and weight classes, the closeting of boxing's top stars gradually made them and their sport not only a niche product, but usually a culturally and socially irrelevant one, too. Pay-per-view has been killing boxing, and thus itself, just like a slow-acting poison murders its victim. The difference in this case is that all this was self-inflicted.

And now, it pleases me to report, the chickens have come home to roost. The recent exit of HBO from boxing not only signifies that "adapt or die" is still a potent maxim, but also that the pay-per-view model, pioneered by them, has collapsed, and fast and hard.

This Wednesday it was announcement that Canelo, the last boxing pay-per-view star, and now former HBO fighter, had signed a reported five-year, 11-fight, $365 million deal with the DAZN streaming service. Along with him came his promoters, Oscar De La Hoya's Golden Boy Promotions, which will put on up to 10 fight nights a year on DAZN starting in 2019.

Critical to this deal, and not highlighted by most of the commentaries on it, is that the announcement of it said: "These fights will be available in all DAZN markets, including the United States, Canada, Italy, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Japan." So as DAZN, which only started showing live events in the U.S. last month, expands to more countries and gains rights to show more sports in each of them, the audience for these Golden Boy and Canelo fights will expand accordingly.

Canelo's first DAZN fight will be on December 15 against WBA super middleweight champ Rocky Fielding, and take place in Madison Square Garden. DAZN, whose subscription fee is about ten bucks a month after a one-month free trial, promised to make this fight available for free to non-subscribers and subscribers alike.

What was most likely the last HBO pay-per-view took place last month and featured Canelo fighting Gennady Golovkin in a rematch of their controversial draw from last year. The price for this card alone was about $85 on cable. Now you can watch all of Canelo's fights on DAZN, including all their various boxing and other sports shows, for that one fee. There is no dealing with the stankiest of companies, the cable monopolies, unless you rely on them for overall Internet access anyway. Cable, which once disrupted the broadcast TV business, has itself been disrupted by this emerging technology.

While this signing may be viewed as an historical turning point for boxing, it is only part of a greater transition from the dominance of cable in the U.S. to a new paradigm where streaming on all sorts of connected devices existing and yet to come takes precedence.

If you want to watch the latest "Star Trek" series, including both "Discovery" and a new untitled one starring Patrick Stewart, you need to subscribe to the CBS All Access streaming service, whether that is the logical thing to do or not. Disney is rolling out new streaming services which will become the exclusive online home of their movies and shows, which will soon be pulled from competing services like Netflix. There is a growing list of these streamers, known in the bizarre industry jargon as over-the-top or OTT services. The expected rollout of 5G in the U.S., which promises super-fast connections, and has already begun in a few trial areas, will only accelerate these developments.

Just where this all ends, which ones survive and which fail, and which ones merge and gobble up the rest, is not yet known. But it is clear that we are increasingly living in an OTT world, and resistance is futile.

Boxing has ridden the crest of emerging technologies, at least since Thomas Edison filmed a boxing exhibition between James J. Corbett and Peter Courtney in 1894, through the days of talking pictures, radio, broadcast TV, cable, and now Internet and mobile. That does not mean, however, that the companies using these new technologies immediately were economically viable. That may take years to accomplish.

In the 1870s, a new, struggling company tried to sell its patents to Western Union, then one of the largest companies in America. Western Union, after a patent fight, declined to work with them. That little company soon became known as the Bell Telephone Company, and later AT&T.

In 1954, the Time-Life media conglomerate launched a new magazine. It would lose money for about a decade, and take that long to hone its content. That magazine is Sports Illustrated, today with new owners, a web site, and available on all the modern conveniences. (While studying magazine publishing at NYU's grad school in the 1980s, we were clearly taught that successful big magazines should expect to lose money for at least five years before they became solvent.)

In 1994, a pie-in-the-sky online bookstore was launched in a garage, soon after the World Wide Web became widely available. In those days it was sometimes on the verge of bankruptcy, and was often ridiculed by the old guard of the business world. That company, Amazon, is now a profitable, multi-billion dollar operation.

Another company, founded in 1997, tried to make a go of it by renting DVDs and shipping them out via the post office. After unsuccessfully trying to sell this money-losing company, they figured out how to innovate and survive. That company then, and now, is known as Netflix.

Tellingly enough, an article in a fixture of the old media which is trying to prosper in today's world, The New York Times, said that Netflix had an "unorthodox media model." They are betting on a formula of: "Spend big now, and reap a massive subscriber base (and big profits) later. Possibly much later." Yet such a model is actually quite common for media companies, even if most fail.
(https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/17/business/media/netflix-streaming-competition.html)

None of this, of course, is any guarantee that DAZN won't end up on another list that includes the Edsel, Kodak, Blockbuster, MySpace, Radio Shack, and more recently Toy R Us. But to attack DAZN now as a flop awaiting collapse, as some of boxing's bought-off "media" are already saying or implying, is nothing short of propaganda for the few beneficiaries of the actually collapsing boxing pay-per-view model.

DAZN has only been around since 2016, starting in the U.S. and Italy this year. It is backed by the multi-billionaire Len Blavatnik and his Access Industries. Originally from the Ukraine in what was then the Soviet Union, Blavatnik now is a citizen of both the U.S. and U.K., and is reportedly the richest man in the U.K. and 50th richest in the world. Since 2011 one of his companies has owned the Warner Music Group. A 61-year-old, short, pudgy, balding man, Blavatnik can be seen hobnobbing with an assortment of celebrities and ruling class figures in a recent in-depth but unflattering profile in The Hollywood Reporter called "Music's Mystery Mogul: Len Blavatnik, Trump and Their Russian Friends", at https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/why-is-warner-music-group-owner-len-blavatnik-russia-probe-1150550.

The Perform Group is the parent company of DAZN, but news reports indicate that Perform is seeking to split into two, sell off its non-DAZN operations, and rename itself the DAZN Group. (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2018/10/14/billionaire-blavatnik-plots-break-sale-perform-empire-fund-netflix/)

The cash from these sales would be added to its coffers as it buys up sports rights around the world in its quest to become the mythical "Netflix of sports". The Canelo-Golden Boy deal must be seen in this light.

Just like magazines initially lose money as they pay for compelling content to attract a paying audience, DAZN is in the early stages of acquiring that content through different marquee sports in countries where the rights are available. Some of that means getting out-of-market streaming rights, like to the NFL in Canada or MLB, NFL, and NBA in Europe, and some of that is getting the streaming rights to top-tier events in their home countries, like Serie A football in Italy and Matchroom Boxing and Bellator MMA in the U.S.

For boxing, besides the Canelo-Golden Boy deal, DAZN began its U.S. streaming operation with a slate of at least 32 Matchroom cards per year, half from the U.S, and half from the U.K. and Europe. With Matchroom promising to expand to more countries, presumably all those cards will be streamed in the U.S.

That gives DAZN, on about its one-month anniversary in the U.S., access to the fights of the top two stars in the world in boxing, unified heavyweight champ Anthony Joshua and unified middleweight champ Canelo.

DAZN also streams the universally-acclaimed World Boxing Super Series in the U.S. and Canada. These tournaments pit most of the best fighters in each of its weight classes against one another, answering one of the most common complaints about boxing's refusal usually to have the best fight the best, and the fragmentation of titles through a dense maze of sanctioning body hooey.

There is nothing today, not even the robust roster of talented fighters who appear on Premier Boxing Champions' telecasts on Showtime and soon on Fox, that matches the depth and breadth of the boxing competition that is shown on DAZN. And that's after only one month.

And still, it might yet tank for any number of reasons. Unresolved technical glitches and outages, scandals and chaos embedded in boxing's history and organization, general economic and political crises, and running out of money before acquiring a large and stable enough subscriber base all are possibilities.

But they do have a large and experienced technical staff, and they have a growing pile of cash to spend. Whether that will see them through world and boxing-related crises is the question that they are trying to answer every day. To write them off today, simply because it will take them time to make it, is unhistorical sophistry fueled by envy and connections to the dying businesses which the OTT world is disrupting and destroying. Let the compromised media vultures find another carcass upon which to chew. And let those uneducated in these historical processes learn critical thinking better than they have at present.

No doubt the older technologies will survive and unpeacefully co-exist with the newer ones for some time. Radio is still around, although millions no longer flock around the living room radio to catch regularly scheduled shows by people like Arthur Godfrey, Jack Benny, and Burns and Allen (you young whippersnappers can remove your VR headsets and earbuds and Google the names of these classic entertainers of the past, since I'm almost done writing this piece).

Thus, in the U.S., boxing on DAZN will compete with the Top Rank and international shows on ESPN and its ESPN+ streaming service, and the PBC shows on the old premium cable network Showtime and broadcast network Fox. Time will tell which ones or one will be left standing, although generally the one with the strongest tie to the newest technologies prevails.

There is bound to be a shakeup and series of mergers and consolidations among the increasingly fragmented OTT services. Enough people will just not subscribe to numerous separate and competing services at once for sports, movies, TV shows, different individual networks, and the rest, in order for them all to survive. Don't be surprised if in several years we have something like DEZPN, or that DAZN, if they are a winner, swallows up one or more of these services.

We thus bid farewell to boxing's pay-per-view rip-off era. This model has been disrupted and destroyed by the forward march of technology and the short-sightedness of its purveyors. There will still be some feeble attempts in the U.S. to keep it on life support, but its condition is terminal. Good riddance to it, and I spit on its grave.

(Photo by Amanda Westcott/DAZN.)

Labels: boxing, Canelo, DAZN, Eddie Goldman, ESPN, HBO, No Holds Barred, OTT, over-the-top, pay-per-view, Saul Alvarez, Showtime

On this edition of No Holds Barred, host Eddie Goldman discusses the recent fights of top ten pound-for-pound fighters Naoya Inoue and Terence Crawford, who both formerly fought on HBO in the U.S., as well as the critical success of the World Boxing Super Series. Also previewed is Crawford's next fight, on October 13 against Jose Benavidez Jr., which will air on ESPN in the U.S. We spoke with Crawford on last week's media conference call.

(Photo of Naoya Inoue knockout of Juan Carlos Payano by Naoki Fukuda/World Boxing Super Series.)

You can play or download No Holds Barred here and here. If one link does not work, please try another.

No Holds Barred is available at Google Play Music.

Also, No Holds Barred is available through iTunes.

You can also listen to No Holds Barred via Stitcher through iOS or Android devices or on the web here.

The PodOmatic Podcast Player app is available for free, both for Android at Google Play, and for iOS on the App Store.

The No Holds Barred theme song is called "The Heist", which is also available on iTunes by composer Ian Snow.

No Holds Barred is sponsored by:

The Catch Wrestling Alliance, resurrecting and promoting the sport of authentic catch-as-catch-can wrestling. The Catch Wrestling Alliance provides tournaments, seminars, and training as well as education about catch wrestling. Join the movement and keep real wrestling alive. For more information, go to CatchWrestlingAlliance.com.

Skullz Double-End Bags, the perfect bag for your combat sports training. Skullz Double-End Bags provide a realistic striking target, and help improve timing, distance, and hand and eye coordination. Hang it and hit it right out of the box! No pump required. For more information, go to SkullzDeBags.com.

Labels: boxing, DAZN, Eddie Goldman, ESPN, HBO, Monster, Naoya Inoue, No Holds Barred, Terence Crawford, World Boxing Super Series

On this edition of No Holds Barred, host Eddie Goldman presents a two-part, multimedia show and analysis.

The written part of the show has an analysis of the Canelo-Golovkin rematch, the emergence of DAZN in the U.S., the PBC deals with Showtime and Fox, the international stardom of Anthony Joshua, and more. It can be read on the No Holds Barred site here.

The audio of the comments by Anthony Joshua about his September 22 fight with Alexander Povetkin can be played or downloaded at here and here. If one link does not work, please try another.

No Holds Barred is available at Google Play Music.

Also, No Holds Barred is available through iTunes.

You can also listen to No Holds Barred via Stitcher through iOS or Android devices or on the web here.

The PodOmatic Podcast Player app is available for free, both for Android at Google Play, and for iOS on the App Store.

The No Holds Barred theme song is called "The Heist", which is also available on iTunes by composer Ian Snow.

No Holds Barred is sponsored by:

The Catch Wrestling Alliance, resurrecting and promoting the sport of authentic catch-as-catch-can wrestling. The Catch Wrestling Alliance provides tournaments, seminars, and training as well as education about catch wrestling. Join the movement and keep real wrestling alive. For more information, go to CatchWrestlingAlliance.com.

Skullz Double-End Bags, the perfect bag for your combat sports training. Skullz Double-End Bags provide a realistic striking target, and help improve timing, distance, and hand and eye coordination. Hang it and hit it right out of the box! No pump required. For more information, go to SkullzDeBags.com.

Labels: Alexander Povetkin, Anthony Joshua, boxing, DAZN, Eddie Goldman, No Holds Barred

by Eddie Goldman

One of the benefits of aging is that it encourages you not to waste time and to get right to the point. In about six months I will turn 70, unless someone destroys the world and/or me, and I'm not taking odds on any of that happening. But a lot has been happening in boxing recently, a lot has been said and written about what has been happening, and a lot of it isn't worth the bandwidth it uses up, so I'll dive right in here with some capsule analyses, which are, of course, No Holds Barred.

Canelo-Golovkin 2. This was a very close fight with a few indistinguishable rounds, and could have gone either way. I thus have no quarrel with the majority decision for Canelo using boxing's ten-point must system. Canelo did the most damage, but needed to work a bit more to convince those who thought Golovkin won. Golovkin was busy with the jab, but inexplicably did not, as many have pointed out, hardly go to the body. Canelo landed fewer but harder shots than Golovkin. So how do you balance all these factors? It would be interesting if there were a way in close fights to score the whole fight rather than just round by round. That creates its own set of problems, but in some fights where the fighters fight to a stalemate and it is inconclusive who had the advantage, the ten-point must system and round-by-round scoring are sort of like trying to appreciate a great work of art by chopping it up into small pieces and examining them separately. But I'm not offering scoring the whole fight as THE solution. In a close fight in a sport where scoring is by definition to a large degree subjective, there may be no solution, except rematches and perhaps allowing judges to score even rounds without the commissions disapproving -- and, of course, not having the promoters pay for or have any say in the selection of the judges.

This was a good fight but not a great fight. There just were not enough moments of high drama, and the fighters often nullified each other and prevented sustained offense.

Even if you thought Golovkin squeaked out a points victory, this was not a robbery as some have claimed, such as the ESPN clown duo of Smith and Atlas. True, Golovkin would have had to smash in Canelo's head to get a decision on a Golden Boy show in Las Vegas, and Canelo did get the benefit of the doubt on many close rounds. That we knew already. But fair-minded and unbiased people could make a strong case that Canelo deserved to win.

Now Canelo and Golovkin may or may not have a third fight next year, and who knows on what network, since their deals with HBO have reportedly expired. HBO was roundly criticized for their production and announcing of this show, with long downtimes and absurdly biased announcing. U.S. rivals Showtime, ESPN, and even Fox have all said they want to run pay-per-views, so if HBO cancels or more severely slashes their boxing program, there are more networks willing to try to grab your bottom dollar to watch major fights.

The only exception to this greedy lot among major players in the U.S. is the upstart streaming-only service DAZN, which just started with a small MMA show last week and has their first live boxing telecast this Saturday, September 22, with the Anthony Joshua-Alexander Povetkin heavyweight title fight from London.

While DAZN itself will not do evil by showing pay-per-views, and you can get all their shows in the U.S. for $9.99 a month, there is a catch to this. The main boxing telecasts on DAZN are from the U.K.-based Matchroom Boxing. Their major cards are on pay-per-view on Sky Sports Box Office, although they charge roughly half of what pay-per-views cost in the U.S. But that means that the primary revenue streams for these Matchroom Boxing cards are the pay-per-views and the live gate, which is also considerable since Joshua usually gets between 80- and 90,000 fans packed into football stadiums to see his fights. So they can afford not to run pay-per-views on the DAZN shows aimed at the U.S., and still get the benefits in their main market.

It's also been widely discussed that DAZN is just starting out in the U.S., is a work in progress, and has a long-term plan to grow and make lucrative bids to acquire the rights to many mainstream sports when they become available in a few years. While they are starting off with a good lineup of combat sports, including the Matchroom cards from both the U.K. and U.S., the highly acclaimed World Boxing Super Series, and what seems like a revitalized Bellator MMA, their key to stability in the U.S. will be breaking through with some combination of NFL football, NBA basketball, Major League Baseball, and/or NHL hockey. Note that DAZN does have many of these rights outside the U.S., so they already have a relationship with these leagues. Until then, they are creating a base of American fans with the combat sports.

With more and more people cutting the cord from the despicable cable companies and a growing number of younger people never bothering to deal with such outfits, and presumably technology continuing to march forward, streaming is certainly here to stay and the future of how sports and all video are and will be watched. But that transition will take many years, and there is no telling to what degree traditional TV will remain popular. A lot of us still listen to AM and FM radio, even on radios themselves, so there may be a not-so-peaceful coexistence of these old and new technologies for some time to come.

This is why the main winner in all this recent media reshuffling in boxing, for the present anyway, is PBC. They were counted out by the tools and fools in the so-called boxing media. They were the subject of spurious lawsuits by those trying to save a dying business model, the Top Rank and Golden Boy promoters. And even some in the MMA world who know less than nothing about boxing thought they wanted to be a monopoly like the odious so-called UFC tries to be.

In the end, or so far anyway, PBC's big gamble paid off. They raised tons of cash in order to buy time on most U.S. TV networks in the hopes of sooner rather than later getting one or more of these networks to cough up rights fees for their shows. Their shows started airing in 2015, but they actually were on too many networks at once for the average fan to keep up with them, and did not have the following of the NFL or MLB, which have big and established enough audiences to thrive on multiple networks. For the last year or so, when they obviously had burned through a lot of their original investments, it looked like they only were getting TV revenue from Showtime.

But then DAZN came along and upped the ante with their announced eight-year, billion dollar commitment. Plus, and more importantly, the media reshuffling was taking place across the entire U.S. sports scene. The Fox networks went through a major reorganization, selling off their TV studio and popular networks like FX to Disney. They did keep the main Fox broadcast network and FS1 and FS2, but needed reliable sources of programming now that they didn't have direct access to their studio. So the focus of Fox switched to live sports. They got Thursday Night NFL Football, always a ratings winner. In so-called sports entertainment, they got one of the WWE weekly shows. But they refused to meet the outrageous demands for the declining UFC brawls which they had been showing, and UFC jumped to Disney's ESPN and their streaming service, ESPN+. Now Fox had a hole in their programming lineup and more cash to spend, and in came PBC. Good timing plus opportunity equals success.

The Fox deal is for major PBC shows ten times a year on free broadcast TV, 12 more shows a year on FS1, Spanish telecasts on Fox Deportes, and they tell us "more than 175 hours of original PBC boxing content per year across its channels". With Fox's reach and the ability to have many millions of people watching live boxing, this is easily the biggest and most far-reaching TV deal for American boxing in years. Couple this with the recently announced PBC-Showtime deal for major monthly shows, this means that PBC will have about three or more shows a month on TV between Showtime, Fox, and FS1, perhaps for as many as 52 shows a year. This easily makes them the biggest boxing organization in America.

For hardcore boxing types in the U.S., with all this televised and streamed boxing, there will be almost no more free Saturday nights. That should be better anyway than going to some overpriced club filled with drunks, hustlers, thugs, freeloaders, and future indicted politicians.

Matchroom Boxing is bigger overall in the world than PBC, but it is premature and lazy thinking simply to speak of a "DAZN era" today, as some already have. Even though the reported yearly budgets for boxing shows on DAZN in the U.S. and for PBC on both Fox and Showtime appear to be in the same range, it will take time for DAZN to establish itself in America. That will likely eventually happen, but let's not run up the "W" flag just yet, so let's leave that to the Cubbies.

Of course, for the PBC deals to work, they will have to showcase and develop stars, and have better cards on Fox than they have had recently, where former champions on the downside of their careers have been in the main events. But PBC has an incredibly deep talent roster in many weight classes, including Errol Spence Jr, Keith Thurman, the Charlos, Deontay Wilder, Jarret Hurd, Shawn Porter, Danny Garcia, Mikey Garcia, Leo Santa Cruz, Gary Russell Jr., Abner Mares, Erislandy Lara, and many more.

The biggest loser in all of this is ESPN. Their main boxing writer continued to disgrace himself as a witless propagandist by calling the PBC-Fox deal "a modest victory". Although ESPN has many more subscribers than HBO and Showtime, and is obviously well-established as a sports network, the Top Rank on ESPN shows have recently drawn miserable ratings, in the 500- to 600,000 range, approaching the dismal numbers their old "Friday Night Fights" cards got a few years ago leading to that show's cancellation. They have had to overpay fighters like Terence Crawford who they hid on the ESPN+ app recently before an audience which had to be a small fraction of what they even get on TV on ESPN. Right now they keep the viewership numbers for ESPN+ secret, which would no doubt interest Disney's shareholders. The Top Rank on ESPN boxing shows often start late and run long, as they are put after live events from other major sports, which are what ESPN really cares about. Top Rank has a lot of great and up-and-coming fighters, so it's a shame these fighters are stuck with this bad deal. And the addition of the Frank Warren-promoted shows from the U.K. to ESPN+ in the U.S. will only give them a very modest boost.

HBO lost a long time ago, with collapsing budgets and an uncertain commitment to boxing from the new ownership of AT&T. Their boxing program is terminal, so it's just a matter of making funeral arrangements now.

While PBC is firmly in the lead in America, they, too are tied to aging technology. There are some statements about streaming buried in the announcements of their Fox and Showtime deals, like that is some afterthought and minor point. With the new super-fast 5G being tested and rolled out starting this year, streaming will become easier than ever. This situation reminds me of the early days of cable in the 1970s and 1980s, when mainstream TV types regarded it as a trashbin of reruns, soft-core porn, and amateur programming. Adapt or die, the maxim goes, and there will be a lot more bodies lying on the roadside before this latest technological upheaval is done, of course only to make way for the next one, and the next one, and the next one, if we don't destroy humanity and the planet first.

It is DAZN, though, which holds an ace that no one else can match. That is the 28-year-old, charismatic, undefeated heavyweight champion of the world, Anthony Joshua. Besides drawing live crowds the size of entire cities, Joshua holds the top two spots on pay-per-view in the U.K., getting over one and a half million buys for his 2017 triumph over Wladimir Klitschko, and slightly under than for his 2018 title unification fight with Joseph Parker. Unlike almost all other fighters and especially heavyweights, Joshua has widespread international appeal. Last year he was named the most marketable athlete in the world, in any sport, by SportPro Media. This year he slipped, but only to number two, behind Paul Pogba of Manchester United and the French national football team. No other boxer made the top 50 of this list. And if you dismiss this because SportsPro Media is based in the U.K. and not up on U.S. sports, the country with the largest number of athletes on this list was the U.S., with 22 out of the top 50.

Joshua's next assignment, as you no doubt already know, is this Saturday, September 22, against former WBA champ and fellow Olympic gold medalist Alexander Povetkin of Russia. Joshua is a huge favorite and rightly so, as the 39-year-old Povetkin possesses power and good boxing skills, but is not a match for Joshua in any department, save for professional experience.

To get some idea of what to expect, we spoke with Anthony Joshua on last week's media conference call. His answers to these questions were widely quoted by media around the world, but the questions and answers were not posted.

I mentioned that I had just rewatched Povetkin's 2013 fight with Wladimir Klitschko, and said, though he and Klitschko have different styles, he will have the same height and reach advantage over Povetkin. I then asked what we can expect from this fight given his height and reach advantage and given Povetkin's history of fights.

"I look at like different fights, like the Marco Huck fight, the David Price fight more recently, then the Christian Hammer -- I don't know. Povetkin fights differently in all of his fights. I think the thing with him and Klitschko," he said, "he really wanted to prove himself. Then you look at the fight with Christian Hammer where it was a 12 round breeze.

"But with that being said, how am I going to approach the fight? However I want to approach it. Maybe I might just box and keep it simple. Maybe I might keep a tight guard and go pound-for-pound with him, trade-for-trade. It just really depends how I feel, but the reason why I say that is because I'm versatile. I can keep it long or I can slug it out. It depends what I analyze from my opponent as soon as I get in there for a minute or two," he said.

"I never really go in there with exactly what I'm going to do from round one to whenever I'm going to get him out of there. I just analyze them punch by punch, and I'll switch up my styles as the rounds go along."

Asked to make a prediction for the fight with Povetkin, he replied, "12 rounds, probably. 11, 12 rounds. He's a tough cookie. He will stay around for a while. And I'll win. I'll win. Yes, we're at an elite level now. These guys, they don't just come with skill. They come with a lot of determination as well."

And he added, with a laugh, "Anything shorter than that is a blessing."

Soon we shall find out.

There are, as is typical in boxing, some wild cards in its immediate future. Promises continue of an imminent official announcement of the Deontay Wilder-Tyson Fury fight, which was announced last month but without a date or location. Chatter, rumors, and leaks pollute the Internet about a Mayweather-Pacquiao rematch, about which only those two seem enthused. Just don't expect too much from all the overseers, lords, and vassals in boxing, and then you won't be disappointed.

Labels: Alexander Povetkin, Anthony Joshua, boxing, DAZN, Eddie Goldman, No Holds Barred, PBC

On this edition of No Holds Barred, host Eddie Goldman spoke with Anthony Joshua, Alexander Povetkin, Katie Taylor, and our media colleague Kristal Hart of the "Kristal Hart Show" at last Tuesday's New York media event announcing the U.S. debut of the streaming service DAZN.

The 28-year-old unified heavyweight champion Joshua from the U.K., with a record of 21-0 with 20 KOs, fights Povetkin September 22 in London on a card shown in the U.K. on Sky Sports Box Office and in the U.S. as the headline fight for the first live show in the U.S. on DAZN. Povetkin, who turns 39 on September 2, and from Russia, is a former WBA champion and has a record of 34-1 with 24 KOs.

We got comments from Povetkin on what to expect in this fight, and some very brief comments from Joshua.

Unified women's lightweight champion Katie Taylor, with a record of 9-0 and 4 KOs, has a very busy schedule coming up. She fights July 28 in London on the Dillian Whyte-Joseph Parker card, and returns on October 6 in Chicago against Cindy Serrano, on a card which will be shown in the U.S. on DAZN and presumably also Sky Sports in the U.K. She discussed her career plans, the growth of women's boxing, and more.

Last but not least, we spoke with our colleague Kristal Hart summing up what we had just learned about DAZN and the combat sports.

You can play or download No Holds Barred here and here. If one link does not work, please try another.

No Holds Barred is available at Google Play Music.

Also, No Holds Barred is available through iTunes.

You can also listen to No Holds Barred via Stitcher through iOS or Android devices or on the web here.

The PodOmatic Podcast Player app is available for free, both for Android at Google Play, and for iOS on the App Store.

The No Holds Barred theme song is called "The Heist", which is also available on iTunes by composer Ian Snow.

No Holds Barred is sponsored by:

The Catch Wrestling Alliance, resurrecting and promoting the sport of authentic catch-as-catch-can wrestling. The Catch Wrestling Alliance provides tournaments, seminars, and training as well as education about catch wrestling. Join the movement and keep real wrestling alive. For more information, go to CatchWrestlingAlliance.com.

Skullz Double-End Bags, the perfect bag for your combat sports training. Skullz Double-End Bags provide a realistic striking target, and help improve timing, distance, and hand and eye coordination. Hang it and hit it right out of the box! No pump required. For more information, go to SkullzDeBags.com.

Labels: Alexander Povetkin, Anthony Joshua, boxing, DAZN, Eddie Goldman, Katie Taylor, Kristal Hart, No Holds Barred

On this edition of No Holds Barred, host Eddie Goldman spoke with Scott Coker, president of Bellator MMA.

We spoke with him at the media event announcing the U.S. debut of the streaming service DAZN, which took place in New York Tuesday.

Bellator will provide an important part of DAZN's programming, which in the U.S. at first will feature the combat sports of boxing and MMA.

With DAZN launching September 10, their first live show will be on September 22, and headlined by the heavyweight boxing title fight between unified champion Anthony Joshua and former WBA champion Alexander Povetkin, from London.

DAZN's first live Bellator card will be shown the following week, on September 29, and exclusively in the U.S. on DAZN. It will feature Gegard Mousasi vs. Rory MacDonald in a middleweight title fight, and veterans Quinton "Rampage" Jackson vs. Wanderlei Silva. Bellator returns to DAZN October 12 with a card headlined by Matt Mitrione vs. Ryan Bader in their heavyweight Grand Prix semifinals, which will be simulcast on the Paramount Network. Bellator, with the new rights fees from DAZN, will be having a ten-man welterweight Grand Prix tournament, also exclusively on DAZN.

Asked about the structure of the arrangement between the Viacom-owned Bellator and DAZN, Scott Coker said, "It's just strictly a license deal, but it allows us to put some of our biggest fights on this platform, because they want to be in the big fight business, and we're going to deliver that. So to me, it was a win-win."

He added, "This is the ground floor. And this will become a full-blown sports channel at some point. But when you talk about combat sports, man, Eddie, what a great value."

By the time DAZN launches in the U.S. in September, it will be available in seven countries.

"I've heard rumors that they're going to expand into another ten countries before the end of next year," he said.

We also discussed the many fights coming up in Bellator, how this deal lets them show pay-per-view level fights on DAZN for the regular monthly fee of US$9.99, Bellator's mix of veteran and up-and-coming fighters including young wrestlers, how Bellator is recruiting top Olympic-level wrestlers, why Fedor Emelianenko is the greatest MMA fighter of all time, and much more.

You can play or download No Holds Barred here and here. If one link does not work, please try another.

No Holds Barred is available at Google Play Music.

Also, No Holds Barred is available through iTunes.

You can also listen to No Holds Barred via Stitcher through iOS or Android devices or on the web here.

The PodOmatic Podcast Player app is available for free, both for Android at Google Play, and for iOS on the App Store.

The No Holds Barred theme song is called "The Heist", which is also available on iTunes by composer Ian Snow.

No Holds Barred is sponsored by:

The Catch Wrestling Alliance, resurrecting and promoting the sport of authentic catch-as-catch-can wrestling. The Catch Wrestling Alliance provides tournaments, seminars, and training as well as education about catch wrestling. Join the movement and keep real wrestling alive. For more information, go to CatchWrestlingAlliance.com.

Skullz Double-End Bags, the perfect bag for your combat sports training. Skullz Double-End Bags provide a realistic striking target, and help improve timing, distance, and hand and eye coordination. Hang it and hit it right out of the box! No pump required. For more information, go to SkullzDeBags.com.

Labels: Anthony Joshua, Bellator, boxing, DAZN, Eddie Goldman, MMA, No Holds Barred, Scott Coker, streaming

On this edition of No Holds Barred, host Eddie Goldman spoke with James Rushton, the CEO of the DAZN sports streaming media company.

This week it was announced that DAZN, which is already in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Japan, and Canada, and will soon launch in Italy, would be starting its OTT (over-the-top) streaming service in the U.S. on September 10. The first live offering will be the September 22 card headlined by the heavyweight title fight between Anthony Joshua and Alexander Povetkin. About 70 fight nights a year, in both boxing and Bellator MMA, are planned for their U.S. service, with more sports expected to be added in the future. The initial price will be $9.99 a month, with the first month free.

We spoke with James Rushton about DAZN's plans for the U.S. at the kickoff media event in New York on Tuesday.

In addition, we open with a commentary on that media event, and an analysis of what DAZN is offering, why it is impressive, and what they need to do to succeed.

You can play or download No Holds Barred here and here. If one link does not work, please try another.

No Holds Barred is available at Google Play Music.

Also, No Holds Barred is available through iTunes.

You can also listen to No Holds Barred via Stitcher through iOS or Android devices or on the web here.

The PodOmatic Podcast Player app is available for free, both for Android at Google Play, and for iOS on the App Store.

The No Holds Barred theme song is called "The Heist", which is also available on iTunes by composer Ian Snow.

No Holds Barred is sponsored by:

The Catch Wrestling Alliance, resurrecting and promoting the sport of authentic catch-as-catch-can wrestling. The Catch Wrestling Alliance provides tournaments, seminars, and training as well as education about catch wrestling. Join the movement and keep real wrestling alive. For more information, go to CatchWrestlingAlliance.com.

Skullz Double-End Bags, the perfect bag for your combat sports training. Skullz Double-End Bags provide a realistic striking target, and help improve timing, distance, and hand and eye coordination. Hang it and hit it right out of the box! No pump required. For more information, go to SkullzDeBags.com.

Labels: Anthony Joshua, Bellator, boxing, DAZN, Eddie Goldman, James Rushton, MMA, No Holds Barred, streaming

By Eddie Goldman

This is shaping up to be one of the most important weeks for boxing this year, and surprisingly so during the hot and sweaty summer months we are enduring in the Northern Hemisphere of our struggling planet Earth.

This Saturday, July 21, at the Olimpiyskiy Stadium in Moscow, Russia, another potential fight of the year candidate will take place, the cruiserweight finals of the World Boxing Super Series. In it, the WBC and WBO champion, Oleksandr Usyk of Ukraine, with a record of 14-0 and 11 KOs, will face the WBA and IBF champion, Murat Gassiev of Russia, with a record of 26-0 and 19 KOs. Two undefeated champions, all four major belts on the line, and the winners earning their place in the finals by triumphing thus far in this eight-man tournament. Plus, each of their semifinal fights, where Usyk got a majority decision over previously unbeaten Mairis Briedis in January, and Gassiev stopped previously unbeaten Yunier Dorticos in the 12th round in February, with each victor having two of those major belts with their wins, were, in my opinion, leading candidates for fight of the year so far in 2018.

Since this was one of the rare times that boxing behaved like a real sport, it was no coincidence that the American TV networks passed on showing this tournament. Instead they fed us, and increasingly made us pay extra for, their steady diet of purposeful mismatches, showcase fights, and recycling of faded former belt holders. Even this cruiserweight final, which will be shown in numerous countries, has no U.S. TV outlet just a few days before the fight. It thus is likely that the World Boxing Super Series, as they have done in the past, will stream this fight in the U.S., hopefully for free.

For the upcoming season two of the WBSS, however, what was essentially an American boycott of the product will end. The new streaming service DAZN, which launches in the U.S. this fall, has picked up the rights in a reported three-year deal. Along with everything else DAZN will be showing, including 32 shows from Matchroom Boxing, equally based in the U.S. and U.K. or nearby, this could quickly make DAZN the number one video source for boxing in America.

This Tuesday in New York, there will be a media event where the details of DAZN’s U.S. launch will be announced, including when it starts and how much it will cost. It has already been confirmed with Matchroom Boxing that both Anthony Joshua and Alexander Povetkin will be in attendance at the media event, which is also supposed to be live streamed.

With the announcement Monday that Joshua and Povetkin will be facing each other Sept. 22 in London’s Wembley Stadium in front of an expected crowd of 90,000 or so, and shown in the U.K. on Sky Sports Box Office, it thus seems quite likely that Tuesday will be the official announcement that the Joshua-Povetkin fight will headline the DAZN U.S. debut show. The only surprise would be if that were not the case.

While some “Make American Boxing Great Again” types are whining that Joshua is not next facing WBC champ Deontay Wilder of the U.S., this fight with Povetkin is the right fight at the right time for Joshua, and actually in many ways more important that a unification fight with Wilder.

First off, Joshua, 28 years old and from the U.K., and with a record of 21-0 with 20 KOs, holds the WBA, WBO, and IBF belts. His goal, obviously, is to become undisputed heavyweight champion of the world, a distinction not achieved since Lennon Lewis did it a generation ago. Povetkin, who turns 39 on Sept. 2, and from Russia, has a record of 34-1 with 24 KOs. Both Joshua and Povetkin have been Olympic gold medalists. Povetkin is the WBA mandatory challenger for Joshua, and also the WBO number one contender, and thus maybe a mandatory there as well, although alphabet soup sanctioning bodies work in mysterious ways.

If Joshua wants to become undisputed heavyweight champion, he must juggle the requirements of these various outfits to retain all the belts. That means occasionally at least fighting one of their mandatories. If, as he is favored to do, Joshua defeats Povetkin, then he can face Wilder at a later date for all four major belts. And that fight then would be massive as well.

But there is more to this fight than simply satisfying the need to face some mandatory challenger deemed worthy by a sanctioning body. Povetkin, though aging, is a legitimate heavyweight contender, and a dangerous one at that. Among the fighters whom Povetkin has defeated are Chris Byrd, Eddie Chambers, Ruslan Chagaev for the WBA belt in 2011, Marco Huck, Manuel Charr, Carlos Takam, Mike Perez, Mariusz Wach, Johann Duhaupas, and Christian Hammer. In his most recent fight, on March 31 of this year, he knocked David Price out cold in the fifth round. Of course, Povetkin had himself been knocked down in the third round and Price has a history of being knocked out. While Povetkin has certainly slowed a bit with age, this was a scary knockout and still showed that he has power.

Povetkin’s only defeat was a lopsided decision loss in 2013 to a still-dangerous Wladimir Klitschko, in which Povetkin hit the canvas four times. But even then, five years ago, Klitschko, who was in those days winning most of his fights by knockout or TKO, could not stop Povetkin.

Now compare that with the list of opponents Wilder has defeated. His best win was also in March of this year, when he stopped Luis “King Kong” Ortiz. Before that, his opponents comprise a list of has-beens, never-wases, and never-will-bes, carefully handpicked by his advisor Al Haymon and the suits at his main TV network, Showtime. His only value is that he holds the one piece of the puzzle missing for Joshua to claim to be undisputed heavyweight champion of the world. Yes, Wilder has a powerful right hand, but his boxing skills are so laughable that he has earned an unofficial nickname of “Windmill”.

Only some Americans have drunk the Wilder Kool-Aid and passionately want a Joshua-Wilder fight. That will likely come one day, as it is certain to be a big money fight, but it is also a fight that Joshua really doesn’t need except for winning that additional belt. Wilder is not a big draw either on TV or in arenas, be they in his home state of Alabama or in the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, where he has failed to sell the place out in his three appearances there.

Povetkin is more of an international star anyway. Many of his earlier fights have been in Germany, with his more recent ones being in Russia and his last one, with Price, as a co-main event on the Joshua-Joseph Parker card in Cardiff, Wales.

So Joshua fighting Povetkin next makes sense in more ways than one. Of course, Joshua is younger, stronger, more agile, and more powerful than Povetkin, and expected to win. But at this point, there is no one in the heavyweight division who could conquer the popular and charismatic Joshua.

If Joshua gets past Povetkin, there is also no urgency for him to take on Wilder next. Some in the dwindling American boxing media might howl, but most of them know as much about boxing as the author of “Howl”, the late Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. If you’re not familiar with that poem, you can look it up online if you really want to, as I won’t distract you with it.

Lurking somewhat out of the shadows nowadays is former heavyweight champ, and still undefeated, and still, surprisingly, listed as just 29 years old, Tyson Fury. His comeback fight, after a two and a half year layoff due to a drug suspension and major physical and mental problems, in June was a complete farce, where he faced cruiserweight Sefer Seferi. The most notable moments were both men dancing the Ali Shuffle, and Fury stopping to look at a real fight in the crowd during the second round. Seferi quit after four, and before even anything resembling a sparring session had commenced.

But a Joshua-Fury fight, with all the expected clowning and jabbering leading up to it, would likely break all U.K. records for a boxing event and would also be a humongous worldwide spectacle. If Fury could in his next fight, in August against the faded Francesco Pianeta, demonstrate that at least he can still fight on a more or less decent level, then a cashout fight with Joshua may not be far off. Joshua has to get Fury before Fury possibly self-destructs again, an unwelcome but far from remote occurrence.

Joshua has also made clear on many occasions that he wants to fight all over the world, including in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Already opponents are building, or perhaps padding, their records to be in place for those paydays. Where does that leave Wilder, and a fight for Joshua in the U.S.? Take a number, and be seated, please.

THe world of boxing in 2018 appears to be rapidly changing. Europe and mainly the U.K. are the main centers of world boxing and home to many of the most important and lucrative fights. DAZN in the U.S. could, if their streaming doesn’t suck, become more popular for boxing than Showtime, HBO, and ESPN. And New York, where the American headquarters of both DAZN and Matchroom Boxing USA are, could regain its status as the U.S. capital of boxing from Las Vegas, where the casinos seems to be otherwise focused.

It’s an exciting time for boxing, both in and out of the ring. Now, oh promoters, networks, managers, and fighters, don’t screw it up.

Labels: Alexander Povetkin, Anthony Joshua, DAZN, Eddie Goldman, No Holds Barred, World Boxing Super Series

2018 1/2 #Boxing
by Eddie Goldman

While 2018 is about half done, I do not wish to present a complete and rather boring recap of everything that has happened in boxing. Rather, a more conceptual analysis of what has been emerging from the great disorder and chaos in the world of boxing is more useful and illuminating. I will thus leave an examination of most of the numbers to others.

What we saw on the latest edition of the Top Rank Boxing on ESPN series Saturday night, July 1, was a microcosm of why boxing, even as it celebrates somewhat of a revival, remains a niche sport, especially in the U.S.

The main event saw 27-year-old unbeaten WBO super middleweight champ Gilberto “Zurdo” Ramirez of Mexico face 34-year-old previously unbeaten and previously little-known Alexis Angulo of Colombia. This fight took place at the Chesapeake Energy Arena in Oklahoma City.

Ramirez is a darling of both Top Rank and ESPN, one they hope will become a major star. But as usual, they are trying to provide shortcuts, and thus detours, on that road to stardom.

Ramirez’s hand-picked opponent for this fight was actually ranked number eight by the WBO before this fight, despite his impressive sounding record, That record included no one of note in his eight years of professional boxing, which has taken him around the world, and no one who would qualify in any independent top ten ranking. Before the fight, even former fighter and now ESPN announcer Timothy Bradley said Angulo didn’t belong in the same ring as Ramirez.

Ramirez’s unbeaten record is also suspect. He has beaten some good fighters, including a faded Arthur Abraham in 2016, but again has beaten no one who would put him among the elite of his division. It is a wide open division, with many of the best in the world fighting in the World Boxing Super Series’ 168-pound tournament, but Top Rank shuns such direct competition in real life like vampires shun crosses in fiction. None of this, however, prevented Fan Rafael of Top Rank, er, I mean ESPN, from ranking Ramirez number one in the division.

Then the fight started, and mirabile dictu, it was not a mismatch. The older and slower Angulo was repeatedly able to land effective right hands on the taller southpaw Ramirez, although far from enough to capture enough rounds to win the fight. Ramirez was faster and more active, and after a while began to establish proper range to control the action. Still, as entertainment it was mostly a dull affair with few dramatic moments, and even fewer reasons to look forward to seeing the eminently hittable Ramirez fight again.

The results then came in, and even though Ramirez deserved to win, the scores were laughable, as two judges gave 11 of the 12 rounds to Ramirez and one gave him a shutout win. But what did we expect on a Top Rank card in Oklahoma, yesterday or today?

On top of that, when the decision was announced, ESPN, the self-proclaimed worldwide leader in sports, posted the wrong graphic, listing the winner as Alex Saucedo.

This card will mostly be remembered for that opening televised bout with local favorite Saucedo, which ended up being a bloody, Gatti-Ward-like brawl against Lenny Zappavigna in the 140-pound division. After multiple cuts to both guys’ bloodied faces, Saucedo recovered from being clobbered earlier to take control. The referee finally stopped the carnage in the 7th round. I think in Oklahoma they only stop fights when rigor mortis sets in.

It was actually the Saucedo-Zappavigna fight that was trending on Twitter in the U.S. during this fight, with only Angulo trending, lower and later, because he performed well above expectations.

And there there was even confusion on some fans’ parts of how to watch this fight in the U.S., since it was on the regular ESPN TV network, but NOT on their new paid app, pompously and inaccurately called ESPN+. ESPN+ subscribers are rudely finding out that it does not include many of the popular telecasts shown on ESPN TV on old-fashioned cable or satellite TV. Top Rank even went on Twitter to berate a fan who couldn’t find it on that app, and was essentially told to look on the other app. That’s why I call it ESPN-. Got it? Tweet me if you do.

ESPN, of course, was one of the many networks which refused to air the World Boxing Super Series in the U.S., preferring to weave its own legend about what is happening in that division with fights like these. It does little to aid Ramirez, since undoubtedly he would be competitive against top fighters like Callum Smith and George Groves, who fight in the World Boxing Super Series 168-pound finals, hopefully very soon.

This past week we started getting what was promised to be a steady series of major announcements from the World Boxing Super Series, although the date for the Groves-Smith final, delayed because of an injury to Groves, has yet to be revealed and maybe even decided.

While ESPN’s announcers gleefully dubbed the Saucedo-Zappavigna brawl the fight of the year, in this first half of the year, my top two candidates both came from the cruiserweight semifinals of the World Boxing Super Series, between Oleksandr Usyk and Mairis Briedis, and Murat Gassiev and Yunier Dorticos. And neither of these fights were picked up in the U.S. by the genius suits of ESPN, Showtime, or HBO.

We are also waiting on announcements of how people in the U.S. can legally watch the Usyk-Gassiev cruiserweight final on July 21, and then their season two tournaments in which they are slowly revealing the participants in their bantamweight and super lightweight tournaments, with more fighters and one more weight class yet to be announced. There have been all sorts of rumors and speculation that season two of the World Boxing Super Series will be on the new DAZN streaming service in the U.S., which debuts probably in September, and perhaps in other countries as well where DAZN has been in operation already.

With HBO’s boxing program seemingly on life support, ESPN being an outlet for the Bob Arum/Top Rank league, and Showtime an outlet for the Al Haymon/PBC league, boxing’s recent spurt upwards in popularity seems in jeopardy as fans demand the best face the best, which, as if you didn’t already know, happens in all real sports, to which boxing and other professional combat sports bear little resemblance.

That has opened the door for DAZN to excel rapidly in the still-lucrative American market, by making the world’s top fights easily accessible to U.S. fans.

Already their plans to show 16 top-level cards mainly from the U.K., which will be on Sky Sports there, including pay-per-views on Sky Sports Box Office, along with 16 cards mainly from the U.S., could quickly disrupt the balance of forces in the U.S. boxing business, and possibly vault DAZN into the number one spot, if they get the right fights and don’t screw up the streaming process, especially when they first launch.

At the top of their list seems to be getting unified heavyweight champ Anthony Joshua on DAZN. He now is a free agent with his Showtime contract having ended, although his promoter, Eddie Hearn, who also runs the boxing operations at DAZN, claims that he will throw open bids for Joshua’s next fight to ESPN, HBO, Showtime, and of course DAZN.

But with all the hoopla, Internet rumors, stories planted in the media to writers who act as promoters’ stenographers, and plain disinformation about a proposed unification fight between Joshua and Deontay Wilder, keep a number of things in mind.

It is Wilder who cannot sell out arenas or draw jaw-dropping numbers on TV, and is virtually unknown outside the U.S., who needs Joshua, the world’s most marketable athlete in any sport, and not vice versa. If this fight takes years to make or even never happens, few outside boxing’s extra-hardcore fans and boxing historians will give an Alabama rat’s ass.

Wilder’s only values to Joshua was that Joshua needs Wilder’s WBC belt to be considered the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world, and perhaps one day to fight in America as part of a world tour which his team has stated hopes to include Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and beyond.

Joshua’s rise to prominence, and also the coming of DAZN to America, are part of a series of developments where Europe, and mostly the U.K., have become the leading centers of world boxing. The biggest crowds, the biggest TV audiences, and the most popularity for boxing is in Europe, while the American promoters and networks play their hare-brained and short-sighted games. At least in places like the U.K., where the same sort of rubbish takes place, they have given the fans a steady diet of good, top-level fights, more than we see in America.

This is why if there is a Joshua-Wilder fight, it will be in the U.K., where arenas of 80- and 90,000 fans are regularly filled up. Since many expect Joshua easily to dispatch Wilder and knock him out cold, something the aging Luis Ortiz almost did earlier this year but couldn’t accomplish, there may not be much call for a rematch if Wilder is exposed. And if there will be a rematch after a Joshua victory, it then can be in the U.S. after those Americans deluded by Wilder’s bluster and propaganda have their eyes opened. And if it is on DAZN here, it could also establish that service as the number one video source for live boxing in the U.S.

For this year however, there was never going to be any Joshua-Wilder fight anywhere. All this back and forth was pantomime to build up their fight next year. And most of the boxing “media” gleefully fell for it and regurgitated the propaganda.

Joshua does need first to satisfy the fee-hungry WBA by facing his mandatory, Alexander Povetkin of Russia. Being undisputed heavyweight champion of the world does have some meaning to people, and if Joshua can do that, he can then ignore the parade of undeserving mandatory challengers of these sanctioning bodies and then be stripped of some of their belts, at which point no one will care since he will have beaten everyone of note. Lennox Lewis did something similar after unifying all the major belts of his era, and remained respected as THE heavyweight champion of the world until he retired as a fighter.

But Povetkin, who turns 39 in September when this fight will likely take place, will not be an easy opponent for Joshua. Povetkin still has power, as his decimation of David Price in his last fight showed, although Price did rock him in the third round for a knockdown. When Povetkin was supposed to fight Wilder a few years ago, I favored Povetkin. That fight was cancelled after a positive PED test by Povetkin. Of course, Povetkin is older now, but unlike Wilder, Povetkin is a skilled and experienced boxer. However, expect Joshua to knock him out eventually.

Wilder will likely next face his WBC mandatory Dominic Breazeale, who was knocked out by Joshua two years ago, and escaped with a win over mid-40-ish Amir Mansour in his fight before that, where he was knocked down by Mansour, who then did not come out for the sixth round, apparently because of an injury.

In the meantime, a babbling Wilder has been complaining to anyone who will listen about the fight with Joshua not taking place this year. He even has denounced DAZN, a brilliant move since DAZN is offering yet another alternative for fighters to get a payday and is competing with the established U.S. TV networks. Yup, fewer choices is just what boxers need.

Wilder’s disgraceful behavior also includes WWE-style rants, aided by a former fighter for the almost-WWE company UFC, and aired by Showtime. Bringing in a UFC guy to talk about boxing is one more step in the decline of the boxing media, and Showtime’s general coverage has been going to shit since they sanctioned the despicable Mayweather-McGregor circus last year.

Wilder has further disgraced himself by going to the White House to appear with the disgraceful Trump when his pardon of Jack Johnson was announced. While other athletes of conscience have refused to meet with Trump, Wilder stands beside him for photo ops. This Jack Johnson pardon, by the way, may be another scam by Trump, as it was suggested by his buddy and supporter Sylvester Stallone, who a few days later by some miraculous coincidence said he is in the process of doing a film about Jack Johnson. We can expect that, unlike some other rumored video footage of Trump, this ceremony will make it into the film.

Making all this even worse, now Wilder is using his Showtime platform to make the ridiculous demand that a revenue split with Joshua be 50-50. Once again this shows that Wilder really isn’t serious about fighting Joshua now, and prefers his usual diet of Breazeale, Stiverne, and Malik Scott. It is a stupid negotiating ploy because it gives the Joshua camp an easy excuse to fight Povetkin, and then Tyson Fury, or even Dillian Whyte if he beats Joseph Parker on July 28, and make as much or more, while Wilder fights in front of a few thousand in Alabama or Brooklyn, and a relatively small audience on Showtime. There is also no guarantee that Wilder even beats Breazeale, or doesn’t get rocked or hurt by him.

All sorts of supposed experts have flooded the Internet with what think they know happened in the negotiations for Joshua-Wilder because they read what Hearn and Wilder’s manager, Shelly Finkel, publicly said. Unless you heard their conversations and actually saw their correspondence and proposals, you do not, period. Do you believe what happened between Trump and Kim Jong-un simply by reading their official statements and reports? I thought not. Then you won’t be surprised when the Trump Tower Pyongyang opens, or Joshua vs. Wilder is quickly signed for next year.

So get ready for several important top-level fights in the second half of this year. Get ready for the debut of DAZN boxing. And stay ready for more disorder and chaos in the boxing world. We no doubt will find out quickly if all of these are good things, or not.

Labels: Anthony Joshua, boxing, DAZN, Deontay Wilder, Eddie Goldman, ESPN, No Holds Barred, Showtime