Above: After flying high on the successes of Manny Pacquiao, such as his second-round knockout of Ricky Hatton in 2009, HBO lost the Filipino icon to Showtime. (Photo by Dave Thompson/PA Images via Getty Images)

Read Part 1: Building the Empire

Read Part 2: The Empire Rises

HBO Boxing was the Roman Empire of the sport. It lasted a ripe 45 years, spanning global cultural changes and technological advances, all while covering an old but ever-evolving sport.

To commemorate the five-year anniversary of the curtain call of one of boxing’s great institutions, Ring Magazine interviewed many of the people instrumental in the rise and sustained excellence of HBO Boxing, as well as the handful who were still there when the fall came in 2018.

Presented in this issue are parts two and three of a three-part oral history told by those who witnessed the rise and reign of HBO Boxing (mostly from the inside), as well as the fall, which was accelerated in 2016 by AT&T buying Time Warner, HBO’s parent company, in a $85.4 billion deal that took 18 months to complete.

Part 3: The Empire Falls

Seth Abraham, former president of Time Warner Sports, at HBO from 1978-2000: “I had been there at HBO for 22 years and I wanted another career challenge. I moved to Madison Square Garden and I wanted to build another team of executives to be successful. Running MSG was a pretty good gig, which I did until 2005. 

“Michael Fuchs believed series programming was for network TV. Michael believed what made HBO unique was in big one-night events with music and comedy. What happened after Michael left was the people running HBO found out series programming can be done on HBO. It started with Oz, The Sopranos, Sex in the City. The fall was irreversible. I saw this happening, with the elimination of our one-time events. I felt that was the beginning of the end, and that was way back in 1999. I felt boxing would be next. I did not want to be present at the autopsy. 

“Lou and I would not have saved boxing. Management at HBO was going towards Game of Thrones, Sex in the City, in the direction of original series programming. Lou and I would not have been able to change that direction, no matter what anyone tells you. Ross did not, but Lou and I could not have changed that direction. Lou and I, at our best, we may have delayed the death of HBO Boxing, but there is no doubt we could not have stopped it. 

“It started with Oz, The Sopranos, Sex in the City. The fall was irreversible.”
– Seth Abraham

“It was not Peter Nelson’s fault, in the end. I’m not advocated for Peter or against him. It’s just the facts. The three people above me at HBO – Michael Fuchs, Dick Parsons and Gerry Levin – were enormous fight fans. Ross, Ken Hershman and Peter Nelson did not have the same support. Do I think Peter did a good job? Probably not, but if I was in that job, I would have gotten the same failing report card. I may have been able to save it for a year or two, but I’m not sure I could have done that.”

Bob Arum, hall of fame promoter: “It began to go downhill when Seth left HBO. Greenburg was a great producer. He wasn’t good at running HBO. He was the kind of guy who went for the shiniest penny. He forgot the contributions other people made to HBO. He forgot the people who helped build HBO Boxing into what it was. He made a deal with Golden Boy, then made a deal with Mayweather. That created a lot of animosity. The heads of HBO did not realize this until I pulled Manny Pacquiao from HBO and delivered him to Showtime. That’s when Richard Plepler and Mike Lombardo, who were running HBO, realized that Ross Greenburg might have been a great producer but was inept at running HBO Sports and HBO Boxing. 

Ken Hershman in 2015. (Photo by Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic/Getty Images)

“HBO Boxing made a real bizarre move by firing Greenburg and hiring Ken Hershman, who was not doing a good job at Showtime. He was not innovative and kept his contract and survived. After Hershman, they replaced him with Peter Nelson, who was worse. The best way to describe Peter Nelson was that he had his head up his ass. 

“The people at HBO were wondering why they were spending all this money and not getting a bang for their buck. Boxing went downhill when Seth left HBO. Bewkes was a tremendous business guy. He was not a boxing guy, but he knew the numbers were good. He was essentially a bean counter. 

“Let me assure you, it was not the guys at the time. They saw the numbers. They knew. They canceled boxing in 2018 because there was no real leadership after Seth. I saw the end coming. I knew Ross was a disaster. Hershman kept it operating without any imagination, and when Nelson took over, I knew it was over. Believe me, they were finished before 2018.”

Lou DiBella, hall of fame promoter, former HBO Sports Vice President in Charge of Programming, at HBO from 1989 to 2000: “Seth was my mentor, and so was Fuchs. I had a very close relationship with Fuchs. Fuchs was a visionary. People tend not to appreciate what he did. When he left, HBO Boxing got a little different, and the head got lopped off in 2000. Seth left after I did. The quality of the programming dropped off. 

“Being honest, there was a noticeable difference in 2003 from what we were doing in the 1990s. There was a noticeable difference in 2010, and it continued. I think a big turning point, and one of the worst decisions in the history of HBO Sports, was when Golden Boy was given the output deal. I think that was the beginning of the end. We never gave anyone an output deal. Golden Boy was working with Al Haymon and gave them a leg up on other promoters and put HBO at odds with other promoters. It ended the era of HBO telling promoters the fights HBO wanted to make. It ended the era of HBO on the high ground saying that we could buy the best and the biggest fights around. They gave one promotional company a set number of dates, alienated Top Rank and made it more difficult to make some of the bigger fights.

“Chaos started a little after Seth and I left. It came over time. Seth had a gravitas. He had more gravitas in the sports world. I was living in the boxing world. After I left, there was no one from HBO living in the boxing world. 

Peter Nelson between trainer Freddie Roach and promoter Sampson Lewkowicz at an event preceding Miguel Cotto vs. Sergio Martinez in 2014. (Photo by Brad Barket/Getty Images for HBO Latino)

“Peter Nelson came in at a time when the future of HBO Sports was already cast in stone. I like Peter. The people who thought that Peter killed HBO Boxing are wrong. That’s not a fair wrap. The one thing I found a little objectionable with Peter is he came in probably knowing he was ushering out boxing. That would not have been a job I wanted. I understand this feeling Peter oversaw the disassembling. He was certainly not the reason for HBO Boxing to fall. He had no creative ideas or connections to turn boxing around, but he came in when HBO Boxing was beyond repair. 

“It took 20 years to put HBO Boxing where it was. It took 18 years for it to fall. HBO is now Max. HBO did not do a very good job preparing itself for on-demand TV. HBO had all the best programming. HBO underestimated the coming competition from Netflix and streaming services. The climate of HBO began changing. It became a more of a bean-counting situation. HBO had bigger problems. They were much more concerned over core problems than they were the decline of boxing. Not a lot of people in the HBO building cared about boxing to begin with. When boxing stopped taking care of itself, when the ratings began declining, which they did over time, it gained even less support from the people in the HBO building. It was no longer must-see television. They had much bigger issues to deal with.”

“It took 20 years to put HBO Boxing where it was. It took 18 years for it to fall.”
– Lou DiBella

Ross Greenburg, former president of HBO Sports (2000 to 2011), at HBO from 1978 to 2011: “If anything, pay-per-view was the downfall. After I left, it was not just HBO, it was the entire sport. The networks divvied up major deals with promoters, with no incentive to put on the best fights on your network. Suddenly, there was no reason to fight the best fighter out there, because they were going to fight on their network. 

“I did not have the budget Seth got. It started at a huge number, and the year after I got in, that number shrank. The attention was still there. Jeff Bewkes, who was HBO chairman, understood the value of HBO Boxing. We were definitely still big in the game. We had stars like Oscar De La Hoya and Roy Jones Jr., and two major stars emerged in Manny Pacquaio and Floyd Mayweather Jr. We still had megafights during my 11 years. 

“The turning point for me, why boxing seems to be in some trouble as we head into 2024, [was that] the pay-per-view game got really carried away. Suddenly, a 300,000 PPV buy was enough to coat the pockets of promoters, managers and fighters. That outgunned the rights fee HBO Boxing was willing to pay for an individual fight to be broadcast live. You had 300,000 TVs tuned into the biggest fights in the sport. That is ridiculous. If you think about any other sport in America, all you read about are the millions that tune into those sports. Sports attracts the highest ratings for any product around. It is where boxing stabbed itself in the back.

Perhaps a sign of how boxing’s stature had diminished, future pound-for-pound king Terence Crawford (right) was featured on HBO Pay-Per-View in 2016 for his junior welterweight championship fight against Viktor Postol, but the fight only brought in a reported 55,000 buys. (Photo by Mikey Williams/ Top Rank)

“As I was running the network, we were looking for any fights we could find that would generate the kind of noise that we needed. De La Hoya was a blessing because Oscar understood that. So, too, did Mayweather in the beginning of his career, and even Pacquiao. They all understood the exposure on a live HBO Boxing show would attract a bigger audience. They knew how to maintain their exposure on HBO and keep the sport alive. 

“I also think in 2000, when we came up with the idea of Hard Knocks, we were the first network to go behind the scenes of a major fight, and we felt it brought a life and coolness to the sport. We wanted to do it for De La Hoya and Gatti, and we waited for a bigger fight, which was De La Hoya and Mayweather. I knew we struck gold when I spoke to my son, who was in college then, and how he and his friends would watch the De La Hoya-Mayweather 24/7 episodes. That created a tremendous interest in the fight. It still captured the imagination of fight fans. Fans could not wait for that fight.

Interest in Floyd Mayweather-Oscar De La Hoya was stoked by HBO’s behind-the-scenes “24/7” series, but fighters with crossover star power had become rare by 2007. (Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Associated Press Images)

“That worked until I left in 2011, and then the 300,000-buy pay-per-view fight did severe damage to boxing. Now, the 100,000-buy fight has done major damage to boxing. If you want to build any major sports star, you have to put that person in front of as many television sets as possible. The more you minimize that number, the more you create just another fighter instead of a charismatic champion. Put Errol Spence Jr. or Terence Crawford in a time capsule and transport them back to 1980, they would be every bit the star as Arguello-Pryor or Leonard-Duran were. They have been put into the cocoon of pay-pay-view, and it is a sorry state of affairs as far as I’m concerned. Mayweather, Foreman, De La Hoya, Tyson, they built their brand by building their audience.

“I liked running HBO Boxing, up until the very end where I was sick of it. In dealing with certain promoters, certain managers – not managers in boxing, but there were certain individuals who were looking to infiltrate the business that were negative. You had people trying to sabotage fights, and sabotage me, frankly. That’s when I got disgusted and was ready to walk away. 

“I was still involved on the production side, and I really enjoyed some of the people in the sport. I enjoyed working with Lou. And I know he’s much-maligned, but I really liked working with Al Haymon. And I loved working with the fighters. I remember meeting Mayweather for the first time and Floyd was about 23. He pointed a finger at me in my office, telling me how he was going to be the biggest thing in boxing – and he was. Even the aggravation in creating and making Lennox Lewis-Mike Tyson, between Showtime and HBO, was worth it. It goes way back to the tape sent to me by Jimmy Jacobs in 1984. I saved that tape for all these years. When Lewis and Tyson faced off, we were behind the curtains, and a fight ensued. All of a sudden, Tyson and Lewis were coming through the curtain and landed on a desk, shattering the desk. Jose Sulaiman was sitting next to me and was pretty badly hurt. To this day, I don’t know what happened to that cassette or the note from Jim Jacobs that I had kept for all those years. That’s gone. Those kinds of memories I will never forget.”

Thomas Hauser, hall of fame boxing writer and HBO consultant (2012-2019): “Ross did not particularly like boxing or boxing people. He gave a huge amount of responsibility in terms of making fights to Kery Davis (now the Athletic Director of Howard University). Kery, in turn, had an alliance with Al Haymon that I don’t think worked to the benefit of HBO or HBO’s subscribers. When Al assumed a position as a favored promoter with HBO, the quality of fights began to deteriorate. There was one period when HBO decided that it was going to anoint the next generation of stars. They had Chris Arreola, Victor Ortiz, Andre Berto and Robert Guerrero, and they constantly threw those guys at viewers in not-competitive fights. 

HBO invested heavily in building up Victor Ortiz (left), but Mayweather knocked out the favored son in 2011, kicking off a series of three consecutive stoppage losses for Ortiz. (Photo by John Gurzinski/AFP via Getty Images)

“I got a letter years ago from a reader. This reader wrote me about how he worked in marketing. And marketing people understood that they could sell a perfume that smells bad. They could sell a shirt that looks ugly. It’s all marketing. One thing they could not sell was boring sports, because people know when they’re being entertained. HBO Boxing stopped being as entertaining as it had been before. When that happened, when Al got preference at HBO, other promoters began to take their fighters elsewhere. I can’t give you a year when things fell apart, because everything is compressed in my mind. But the decline began when Seth and Lou left.

“You have to distinguish between HBO Sports and HBO Boxing. Ross was committed to HBO Sports. He put on Real Sports, Bob Costas, and Inside the NFL and these wonderful documentaries. But boxing was a chore to Ross. He delegated more to Kery than he should have. There was a gradual decline in the quality of HBO’s fights. When Ken Hershman came in, HBO’s boxing program could have been salvaged. But Ken did not make the right moves and he certainly did not make the right fights. 

“… in the end, it came down to the quality of the fights.”
– Thomas Hauser

“By the time Peter Nelson came in, the situation was hopeless. The budget was very small. Peter did not have total autonomy over how the budget was to be spent. And he had been left with some toxic assets from Ken Hershman in the form of fight obligations. Peter knew there was a diminished commitment to HBO Boxing. He did his best to work around that. But he had a limited budget. At the height of the Seth Abraham era, the budget was close to $125 million. Peter had a fraction of that to work with.

“I was told in confidence well in advance that HBO was planning to shut down its boxing program. I wasn’t shocked. You could see the handwriting on the wall. Their studies showed that a diminishing number of people were subscribing to HBO for the boxing. That could have been avoided if Ross and Ken had taken different steps. But they didn’t. And because of the Balkanization of boxing, signing what had once been thought of as “HBO-quality fights” was becoming increasingly difficult. Also, HBO prided itself on being unique. You had great production values from top to bottom. Their boxing productions were different from everyone else’s and better than everyone else’s. Then other networks started to duplicate what HBO was doing. 

“But in the end, it came down to the quality of the fights. I have an HBO Boxing jacket that I used to wear on the street. People would stop me and say, ‘Oh wow, cool jacket. Where can I get one?’ Later, they would see me in that jacket and it became, ‘Hey, when are you guys going to start making good fights again?’”

Jim Lampley, hall of fame boxing broadcaster, HBO’s blow-by-blow commentator (1988-2018): “I was confident enough about our relationship with HBO and with Time Warner that I had no fears. I began hearing the rumblings of a possible sale with new owners coming through the door. I thought boxing was so essential to the network and such a successful telecast on the network I wasn’t thinking, ‘Oh, the end could be coming.’ That didn’t occur to me until sometime fairly shortly after the sale (to AT&T) was finalized. I was at an awards party in Los Angeles when Richard Plepler, the chairman of the network for a number of years – a wonderful man, and in a lot of ways my sponsor – came up to me and asked if he could introduce me to one of the key guys at AT&T. Richard thought it was very meaningful that I get to know this person and cultivate a relationship with him. He took me over and introduced me to him. I won’t name names to single anyone out, but within 10 to 15 minutes, in one conversation, I recognized a culture change. These people do not think the way HBO/Time Warner people traditionally think. Number two, a relationship change. This person did not express anything to me that would compute to ‘I value you. I know how important your telecast is to us. I really want to get to know you better.’ That was not the feel or vibe at all. This was at a gilded, glorious party, following another night of winning a pile of awards for HBO, Emmys or Golden Globes. As my wife and I were leaving the party, I remember telling her, ‘The flood is coming,’ and the flood came. 

“Time Warner was a high-end, very cultured entertainment company with very meaningful standards, and in comparison, the AT&T people were bean counters. I probably blocked it out when I heard HBO Boxing was ending. It meant boxing was going to go away. My show, The Fight Game, was going to go away, and it meant I was going to go away.”

Remembering The Empire

Abraham: “Like the Roman Empire, HBO Boxing had a mission. It wasn’t just a single fight. We had to be and have the best. We had to be the best at everything. We had the best production. We had to have the best production. We had the best advertising. The best marketing. We had the best fighters, regardless of nationality and background. We bought fights from everyone. I was surrounded by very talented people, and I allowed those talented people to do their jobs. My contribution was to get out of the way. 

“I’m absolutely proud of what HBO did for the sport of boxing. It was hard watching the end. I understand times change. We have 13 HBO people in the International Boxing Hall of Fame. We impacted the sport. Like the Roman Empire, we had a very big spread. I had talented people who I trusted in doing their jobs well. But we had legions of talented people whose mission was to make HBO Boxing the television champ of the world. From 1978 to 1988, HBO Boxing televised every heavyweight championship fight.”

Arum: “HBO Boxing was the gorilla in the room. At the time, Showtime was next to nothing compared to HBO. The networks could not compare. HBO was a giant. They got great quality. Their shows were the best. HBO Boxing was must-see TV. I look back and wonder if it would have been different if Lou DiBella took over for Seth. It would have survived. It should have never reached the state it was in at the end. If DiBella stepped in, HBO Boxing would still be running strong. I look back on it for the great events they had. I had ESPN for 15 years, and that stopped, and we’re back with ESPN again going strong. The one thing I know as an old man is nothing is ever the same.”

“… it’s still sometimes hard for me to wrap my arms around the fact that in 2018, boxing left HBO forever.”
– Lou DiBella

DiBella: “I don’t reflect on those times as much as you would think. I have no regrets. I understand I could have done things differently. But I also understand who I am. I understand leaving HBO in 2000 is the best thing that ever happened to me. I established a career as a promoter and proved I could do it on my own. I bought two Class AA baseball teams. They’re both successful businesses. One is a super-successful business in Richmond, Virginia. It was always my dream to buy a baseball team. I wouldn’t have been able to live my dream if I had stayed at HBO. 

“I ruminate on HBO Boxing only because I loved HBO Boxing. I loved my years there. I will always be very proud of that. But it’s still sometimes hard for me to wrap my arms around the fact that in 2018, boxing left HBO forever. That’s hard for me to ruminate on, and it’s probably the reason why I don’t. It’s something that will never make me happy. I believe had HBO stayed in boxing, and had Seth and I stayed at HBO, under different circumstances, the state of boxing would be different today. In that period of the 1990s, we had more power and authority than the WBC, IBF, WBO and WBA put together. We were more powerful than those four organizations put together. We were like a family with three different platforms – HBO Championship Boxing, TVKO and Boxing After Dark. The three most important letters in boxing for a long time was not WBC, WBO, IBF or WBA – it was H-B-O. We were the Roman Empire of boxing. No one was prepared for the decline.”

Greenburg: “I wasn’t surprised when the end came. I was sad. HBO was nice enough to invite me to a going-away dinner for the franchise. It was a nice moment and a nice night to see everyone together. I’m sure if Roone Arledge were alive today, he would be sad to see what happened to ABC Sports. Hopefully, someone can resurrect boxing. It’s been declared dead many times. Muhammad Ali came along and resurrected it. I don’t know if anyone like him comes along again, but hopefully a group of fighters can come and build interest in the sport.

Gennadiy Golovkin’s decision victory over Daniel Jacobs in 2017 garnered fewer than 200,000 pay-per-view buys. (Photo by Tom Hogan-HoganPhotos / K2 Promotions)

“This has been a slow decline. From 1990 to now, pay-per-view provided fast, quick money. There is a reason why the NFL remains on network TV. Actually, there are a hundred million reasons, but when you reduce that number to 100,000, what are you doing to that sport? 

“What will always resonate with me are the memories of the great fights we had. You can never take the memories of those fights away, especially the way they were captured on HBO Boxing and how the stories were set up. Boxing is the most dramatic sport on TV, maybe second to the NFL, and the fighters, many came from nothing, and they are featured in these triumphant Super Bowls. I’ll never forget the magical moments when Mike Tyson was reaching for his mouthpiece in Tokyo, and Ray Leonard raising his hands in the air after he knocked out Hearns. I’ll never forget those images.”

Hauser: “Boxing was enormously important at one time to HBO, and HBO was enormously important to boxing. I think of it as the Golden Age of boxing. It will never be repeated. Jake Paul speaks to the decline of boxing. I give Jake Paul credit for going to the gym and being the best fighter he can be. It’s not a knock on Jake Paul. It’s a knock on boxing for creating that void for Jake Paul to step into. If you had Jake Paul playing one-on-one basketball against a low-level opponent, do you think a couple of hundred thousand people would buy that on pay-per-view?

“What resonates for me with HBO Boxing are memories of looking forward to a big fight on Saturday night and having confidence that, because it was on HBO, I could expect a certain level of quality. I knew turning on the television and hearing the electric voice of Jim Lampley, who I believe is the greatest blow-by-blow commentator in the history of boxing, hearing him blend perfectly with Larry Merchant, and George providing one type of commentary and Emanuel another, I knew I was going to be entertained. People trusted HBO to be good. There were times when not many people knew who some of the fighters on HBO were. But because it was on HBO, they trusted it and tuned in. They didn’t know what Boxing After Dark was at first, or who Marco Antonio Barrera and Erik Morales were, but they knew the fights were on HBO.

“HBO Boxing had credibility, and then it squandered that credibility. If Seth and Lou had never left, HBO Boxing would have survived longer than it did because the fights would have been better. You wouldn’t have had HBO trying to force-feed Andre Berto, Victor Ortiz, Chris Arreola and Robert Guerrero to its subscribers as the future of boxing.”

Sugar Ray Robinson attacks Carl “Bobo” Olson during their middleweight title bout at Chicago Stadium in 1955. (Getty Images)

Lampley: “Again, remember, the executive at ABC, Dennis Swanson, who first assigned me to boxing was doing it to get rid of me. He thought there was no way I would fit. He did not know that my father died when I was 5 of cancer in 1954. When I was 6 in 1955, when my mother took me to a cocktail party in the neighborhood, walked me down the hall and sat me down on a sofa looking at a small television that had been set up on a TV dinner tray, she told me sit right here, watch this television. You’re going to watch the Friday Night Fights, presented by Gillette. You’re going to be seeing the [third] fight between Sugar Ray Robinson and Bobo Olson. You’re doing this because if your father were still alive, this is where he would be and this is what you would be doing with him. She told me in the next 90 minutes or so, a man named Don Dunphy is going to tell you everything you ever needed to know about boxing. She left the room. It was the very first sports event I can remember watching. 

“Dennis Swanson assigns me to boxing to get rid of me. No way in the world he could have ever dreamed that the first sports event I ever watched on TV was a boxing match. I fell in love with the Friday Night Fights. I had an internalized background in boxing that Dennis Swanson could never have dreamed. He installed me at ringside to present the beginning of Mike Tyson’s career. HBO Boxing is part of me. It will always be a part of me. I was on the Miracle on Ice telecast and think of HBO Boxing as an unprecedented phenomenon in American television. It was about the specialized moment that could not be duplicated. I got a chance to be in the center of it. How could you not miss it? Nothing was ever as special to me as HBO Boxing. I think about it and miss it every day. We had an astonishingly special experience. Those 31 years of boxing at HBO was enclosed. It could not last forever.”

Joseph Santoliquito is an award-winning sportswriter who was inducted into the Atlantic City Boxing Hall of Fame in 2023. He has contributed to Ring Magazine/RingTV.com since October 1997 and is the president of the Boxing Writers Association of America.

Follow @JSantoliquito