Thursday the indefatigable Lem Satterfield broke news that Ken Hershman will replace Ross Greenburg as President of HBO Sports – a position akin to Commissioner of Boxing. The choice of Hershman was generally and enthusiastically applauded by boxing insiders hither and yon. Hershman, for the innovative way he handled a similar position at Showtime, is well regarded by aficionados.
A quick note about that word above. Anyone who thinks “indefatigable” is not an apt way to describe Satterfield has never been in a media center with him. Even veteran reporters marvel at his volume. Any youngster hoping to become a boxing reporter someday would do well to study Satterfield. If you can work even half as hard as Satterfield does, you’ll be reporting circles round your peers in no time.
Back to Hershman. Within hours of his appointment, some insightful pieces were published online. A few comprised parting shots at the disastrous-for-boxing Greenburg Era, others summarized Hershman’s accomplishments at Showtime – with well-deserved nods to the Super Six World Boxing Classic – and most gave HBO Sports’ new chief some advice.
The best of this came from Kevin Iole, who wrote, “The HBO Sports dogma during the Hershman regime needs to be simple: Fight your way onto the network and fight to remain on the network.”
That’s an easy-to-remember remedy for what ailed the network’s coverage of boxing much of the last decade. For a number of reasons, some indecipherable and most nothing a subscriber should have to worry about, HBO Sports made terrible boxing decisions under Greenburg. Saturday’s Dawson-Hopkins debacle on HBO pay-per-view should stand as a 21-gun salute to the departing Greenburg regime.
Writing of pay-per-view, that seems good a place as any to offer Mr. Hershman a little more advice: Audit pay-per-view receipts for the last three years.
Sept. 19, 2009, Floyd Mayweather fought Juan Manuel Marquez on HBO pay-per-view. Six days later, HBO released a statement proclaiming its event had been purchased by a million buyers. Ludicrously symmetrical numbers like 525,000 cable homes and 475,000 satellite homes added up to a million. Everyone went along with the number because, well, it proved our sport was healthier than any of us would have believed before that number got published.
Sept. 17, Floyd Mayweather fought Victor Ortiz. Thirty days have passed. Pay-per-view results have not yet been published.
Whatever the reason for this, now that we know there’s nothing automated about HBO’s tabulation, we’re afforded a chance to look skeptically backwards at other numbers we’ve been fed. The difference between the 750,000 pay-per-view buys many expected for Mayweather-Marquez and the announced “more than 1 million” is 250,000, which, when multiplied by $50 each, comes to $12.5 million. That’s a princely sum in boxing. But it represents 0.048 percent of the 2009 revenues generated by HBO’s parent company, TimeWarner. That’s not even an accounting error; it’s a nick on a penny.
Mayweather-Marquez, remember, happened when HBO Sports was rather brazenly using Golden Boy Promotions – lead promoter for the fight – as a counterbalance to promoter Bob Arum’s machinations. Arum had Pacquiao, and Golden Boy Promotions was representing Mayweather. Negotiations for the Fight to Save Boxing were not even two months away. Would it have behooved someone to apply creative-accounting techniques to the buy rate for Mayweather-Marquez? Is that something HBO Sports would do?
We don’t know. But it’s one of the first questions Hershman should ask before his tenure begins in January. Starting in Q1, after all, any drop in pay-per-view sales will be his fault. There’s plenty of corporate precedent for this sort of audit; anymore, Wall Street earnings are restated almost as often as they’re stated.
Something else for Hershman to consider came courtesy of an interesting point made by Tim Starks, Thursday. “In fact, it’s fair to wonder,” wrote Starks, “when looking at what comes next for HBO under Hershman: Was Showtime creative because it has had the right personnel, or because it had no choice?”
Starks’ question goes directly to the nature of Hershman’s promotion. Hershman is our sport’s new emperor. He is no longer the leader of an underdog outfit for which aficionados reflexively cheer. His budget has grown considerably. How effectively will he grow with it?
That’s a question two titans of the 1990s, Bill Gates and Newt Gingrich, might help him answer. Gates was the leader of a Microsoft insurgency that challenged IBM’s primacy in what was not yet called IT. Gingrich was the leader of a Republican party that had not held the Speaker’s gavel in the U.S. House of Representatives in 40 years. Neither man made a successful transition from guerilla leader to governor. Gates bullied Netscape and got his company hamstrung by the Department of Justice. Gingrich bullied the president and had to leave the Capitol before Clinton left the White House.
What is charmingly feisty when you are in a minority position becomes off-putting once you assume power. Hershman might combat the corrupting tendency of his new power by silently shrinking his boxing budget. HBO’s documentaries have been for the most part much better than its boxing in the last 10 years, and it might not be a bad idea for Hershman to use this fact to tell the ever-warring factions of boxing advisors, promoters and managers there’s now a much smaller pie for them to gorge on. Since Hershman is intimately familiar with what Showtime can bid for a fight, he might also limit HBO’s future bids to a formula like this: Showtime plus 10 percent.
It is not hard to imagine a more just, if not immediately better, system is coming to our beloved sport. That is cause for rejoicing. Dawson-Hopkins is what bottoms look like, after all, and so we welcome Mr. Hershman to the throne – even while our knives are sharpened.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
