Analysis: Why Showtime Canceled Boxing

Showtime Sports president, Stephen Espinoza said, “As we evolve our strategy to more efficiently allocate resources and align our content offering across the business, we’ve made the difficult decision not to move forward with boxing and other content produced by the Showtime sports team. Showtime will continue to air and support the remaining 2023 boxing slate and honor obligations through the end of the year. We want to express our deepest gratitude to our employees who have contributed to this award-winning sports programming over multiple decades.”

Top promoter Oscar De La Hoya tweeted, “I salute Showtime for their near-40 year commitment to the sport that I love. I am hopeful that we promoters can use this unfortunate situation to put our differences aside and start working together more often to help make more of the bigger fights and grow our sport.”

Major decisions such as this one by Showtime Boxing are provoked, they don’t just happen randomly. Their boxing programming was failing to generate projected profits or sustain revenues of the past. And hopes and expectations for the future obviously declined significantly.

Showtime canceling boxing is the inevitable consequence of years and years of fake fights, set ups and protecting fraudulent American stars. The fighters and promoters, namely Al Haymon, took the power away from the networks to order and produce the best fights. Now elite boxing is virtually a graveyard of all set ups, fake fights and soft sparring sessions. Until we get back to BEST vs the BEST, boxing will continue to sink into irrelevance.

While some leading boxing figures are interpreting Showtime’s decision as an opportunity for boxing to unite and once again regain the spirit of daring to be great and matching the best versus the best, this may be pure fantasy and false optimism.

Because it’s hard to imagine Tyson Fury suddenly agreeing to fight Usyk and Joshua. It’s difficult to envision Wilder no longer ducking and fake negotiating with Joshua. It’s impossible quite  frankly to expect Tank Davis to sign a contract to fight Lomachenko, Teo Lopez, Haney or Stevenson. So Charlo is suddenly going to stop faking injures and fight Tim Tszyu? And I just can’t see Canelo putting his $400m brain and health at risk against the punches of Beterbiev, Bivol, Crawford, Benavidez or Alimkhanuly.  And who really thinks Al Haymon – who “can manipulate anything” and “manages outcomes in advance” – will suddenly throw caution to the wind and risk his key assets in real fights that could damage their leverage, self preservation, value and future earning power?

I remain doubtful the current powers that be in boxing can change their stripes or control their lust and greed for extending their long term revenue streams with more phony fights.

But please prove this skeptic wrong boxing, please.