By Norm Frauenheim
There are questions. Optimism, too. Mostly, there’s relief that Top Rank’s 60-years of expertise in the promotion and development of fighters is back on a significant platform with potential to sell and sustain the volatile boxing game.
We still don’t know exactly how long Top Rank’s deal with DAZN is, or whether there are any clear limits on exclusivity regarding dates and matchups with fighters tied to rival promoters.
Potential land mines, of course, are buried in the fine print of a deal announced Wednesday. It wouldn’t be boxing if they weren’t. Risk and reward, drama and disaster are all there. Caveat emptor. It’s a timeless warning, one that simply leads to another one heard before every opening bell. Defend yourself at all times.
Top Rank has, brilliantly so throughout a turbulent eight-month stretch when fans, pundits and a new generation of promoters were saying the longtime entity was dead. Mark Twain once had something to say about premature obits. News of his death, he said, had been exaggerated.
In Top Rank’s case, it surely was. After Top Rank’s final show with ESPN in July, it looked as if there was a vacuum. Saudi money, The Ring, Zuffa and TKO threatened to take over.
The threat is still there. The idea is to rewrite the Ali Act and do away with the confusing array of weight classes and titles prevalent throughout the so-called four-belt era. But there are still no real answers. Questions linger. Chaos looms.
Fans, so often forgotten, sit and wait, wondering whether it’s just a revolving door. The WBC, WBO, IBF and WBA leaving; The Ring, Zuffa and TKO arriving. Acronyms in; acronyms out.
Some fans don’t know much about it. Many don’t care. But they do know good fights and who puts them together. Over the last eight months, that’s been 94-year-old Bob Arum’s Top Rank. Amid the mess of uncertainty throughout the last year, Top Rank’s trademark resilience has been there with a quiet, yet powerful adherence to fundamentals.
The Top Rank template was never more evident than the co-promotional role it played with Eddie Hearn’s Matchroom on Feb. 28 in a stunning performance by Emanuel Navarrete in an upset stoppage of Eduardo Nunez for a unified junior-lightweight title in front of a crowd of about 12,000 at Desert Diamond Arena in Glendale, a Phoenix suburb.
In the card’s immediate aftermath, it was a story about a couple of dramatic
comebacks, Navarrete and the Phoenix market, which had gone dormant with the advent of Saudi money and the Riyadh season.
A couple of weeks later, it became evident there was a third comeback: Top Rank. In part, it was expressed by Emiliano Vargas, the emerging son of former great Fernando Vargas, also his trainer. Vargas, boxing’s hottest prospect and a Top Rank fighter, had just embellished his credentials with a victory – punishing and powerful — over junior-welterweight Agustin Ezequiel Quintana.
Vargas thanked the fans and then said what fellow fighters are beginning to learn about the AZ crowd, called “educated” by Hearn. They know what they’re watching. He says he wants to fight his first main event in Phoenix. The crowd roared its approval.
Eighteen days later, there was a further approval in the Top Rank-DAZN alliance, formally announced during a news conference at New York’s Madison Square Garden.
The deal is still being worked out, according to Arum. It had probably been under negotiation for weeks before Feb. 28.
But that last night in February was full of reasons, all comebacks, about why it got done. Top Rank is calling it “a new era,’’ and for the younger generation in that AZ crowd it is.
But it’s also proof that new eras work because of old fundamentals that always do.
