Columnist Dean Juipe: Boxing hurt by ESPN decision

Dean Juipe

Wednesday, Dec. 10, 2003 | 9:43 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4084.

The dates, times and sites of its shows routinely change with little notice and the announcing teams can be downright brutal, yet for the past five years ESPN has had a monopoly on televised boxing on basic cable. For fight fans, it has been better than nothing.

And nothing may be what's next.

ESPN has announced that effective February it will no longer pay rights fees to promoters to televise boxing cards and that it will reduce the number of cards it televises to no more than 45 per year. That spells trouble for a sport that is almost totally reliant on building its stars (and their name recognition) from the ground up.

"It leads me to believe it's the beginning of the end for televised boxing on ESPN," promoter Art Pelullo said Tuesday from his office in Philadelphia.

At a time when ESPN is attempting to increase the revenue it receives from cable providers (such as Cox, in Las Vegas), it is greatly decreasing the value of one of its assets. Boxing may not be a ratings bonanza, yet it has its hardcore followers who at least partly associate the sport with the TV network.

ESPN pays a promoter $50,000 to televise a boxing card but will eliminate that stipend at the end of January. The move forces those few promoters who may be willing to deal with ESPN to obtain site fees and sponsors in order to put on a card.

Let me speculate here and say those site fees and sponsors are going to be hard to come by, if not completely impossible to find.

The result will be fewer cards and, just as important, fewer quality fighters on the ESPN shows.

"It's a bad situation for anyone trying to develop talent," Pelullo said. "It may actually be impossible."

ESPN is justifying the move as a "business decision" based on its declining ratings for boxing. Its weekly show has dropped from a 1.5 share of the audience to 1.0 to its present 0.8.

It's easy to picture the ESPN executives saying "We're losing money on boxing anyway, so let's just quit paying for it."

But ESPN is losing its boxing audience not because there aren't fight fans out there, but, in large part, because of the inferior manner in which it handles its telecasts. It all but refuses to promote its cards and it utilizes broadcasters who are sometimes obnoxious, occasionally misinformed and frequently off target with their analysis.

Beyond those nuisances, it shuttles its cards (from Fridays to Tuesdays, etc.) and has almost no dependability. Last Friday, for example, it told the nation's weekly TV guides that it would televise a heavyweight fight from Fresno between Lawrence Clay-Bey and Samuel Peters, when, in fact, the actual telecast was from the Virgin Islands and featured lightweights Courtney Burton and Francisco Lorenzo.

Look in your TV book right now and you'll see Friday's ESPN2 card is scheduled to originate in Detroit, but, in truth, it will be televised from the Edgewater casino in Laughlin (if current plans hold true).

Boxing on basic cable has been bleak for years, or since the USA network dropped the sport in 1998, and it's about to get worse.

Despite the potential for success that ESPN brings to any event, it has mismanaged its boxing telecasts to the point where extinction is the next logical step.