The Rise and Fall of the HBO Empire – part one

This three-part series first appeared in the January and February 2024 issue of The Ring, available to subscribers. 

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.

HBO boxing programming bridged five decades – launching 1973 and lasting until 2018 – bringing everything from iconic showdowns between all-time greats to live riots and the bizarre “Fan Man” incident into the living rooms of fight fans throughout the world. The production was cutting edge and the voices and faces of the broadcast crews became as known to boxing fans as the famous fighters showcased on the network. 

By the late 1980s, the growing premium cable channel was already renowned for its lavish, glamorous displays of what was often deemed a tarnished sport: Sugar Ray Leonard’s amazing 14th-round comeback against Thomas Hearns, the scintillating Marvin Hagler-Hearns shootout, the anticipated Hagler-Leonard showdown – all Ring Magazine fights of the year.

HBO Sports tried to produce every World Championship Boxing broadcast with a Super Bowl ambience. Championship Boxing produced spinoffs like the popular and groundbreaking Boxing After Dark series, while HBO Boxing itself evolved to include TVKO (later HBO PPV), the pay-per-view arm that debuted spectacularly with the 1991 Evander Holyfield-George Foreman heavyweight title bout.

HBO Boxing continued to grow and thrive during the 1990s, and it endured throughout the 2000s and 2010s, but it would eventually crumble, as all great empires do.

The last HBO Boxing telecast took place on Saturday, December 8, 2018, headlined by undisputed women’s welterweight champ Cecilia Braekhus beating Aleksandra Magdziak Lopes by unanimous decision. Despite taking place before a scant crowd at the StubHub Center, in Carson, California, the card resonated because it was the end of an era. Jim Lampley gave a tearful final sendoff with his hands shaking as he left his indelible mark on an institution.

The first fight between Sugar Ray Leonard and Thomas Hearns helped put HBO on the map. (Photo by Focus on Sport/Getty Images)

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.

This is 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 1: Building the Empire

Seth Abraham, former president of Time Warner Sports, at HBO from 1978-2000: “I was actually the first president of Time Warner Sports, from January 1990 to September of 2000, originally hired by David Meister. David and I worked together at the office of baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn. David left to run HBO Sports, and he approached me in early 1977 and asked, ‘How would you like to come and work for me at HBO?’ For basically a year, I said no thanks. When I came in 1978, for about a year, maybe a year and a half, I reported to David. He eventually left to take another job inside HBO. 

Seth Abraham in October 1989. (Photo: The Ring Magazine via Getty Images)

“Then my titles began changing. David Meister technically was the first head of HBO Sports, but I was the first one with the title. The very first telecast [of the HBO network], and part of HBO lore, was a movie starring Paul Newman called Sometimes a Great Notion. The second program on HBO was on November 8, 1972, a New York Rangers-Vancouver Canucks hockey game. The very first fight was [Joe Frazier vs. George Foreman], transmitted by HBO on closed-circuit. That was a rebroadcast, not live. This was the dark ages, pre-beginnings of HBO Sports then, since there was no ESPN then, there was no Showtime, there was no FOX Sports, there was no FOX Network then. What HBO Sports was then was a collection of very disconnected, disjointed sports programming. It had no theme, it had no motif, it had no North Star. 

“When David moved on to another division, I spent a fair amount of time thinking about what HBO Sport’s identity could be. It began with a process of elimination. HBO could not afford the NFL. Out. Could not afford Major League Baseball contracts. Out. Could not afford NHL contracts. Out. Could not afford any of the league sports. So now, we started to look at the gamut of individual sports. Gymnastics, figure skating, and then, then boxing.

“One of my first moves was to move Tim Braine elsewhere in the company, because I wanted Ross Greenburg to be our head producer. I needed Ross in the truck. Comparing it to baseball, Tim was a .350 hitter, but I realized quickly Ross was a .400 hitter. Ross was Ted Williams. I had to make sure we had the right people doing the right job, with Lou DiBella running matchmaking and buying fights, Mark Taffet running TVKO, and Barbara Thomas was the chief financial officer and ran the budgets. I had to stay out of their way. It was a legion of talented people running HBO Boxing. I also quickly realized the impact that pay-per-view attractions would be around 1988. We realized that if we did not get into the pay-per-view business, we would lose the big fights and be left with B- and C-level fights. We created TVKO to get the big fights and protect the mothership, Championship Boxing.”

Bob Arum, hall of fame promoter: “Saying HBO Boxing was like the Roman Empire of boxing is like everything else – it depends on who was the Caesar. The Caesar was Seth Abraham. Whether you liked Seth or not, Seth was an expert on handling all the egos he had to deal with. He knew programming, and how to keep everyone at least nominally happy. Seth knew how to run a network like that while dealing with all the wild people in the sport of boxing. 

“At first, when HBO came on the scene, their first real move was the three-fight deal with Marvin Hagler in prime time for three times the money a network was willing to pay. The result and experience from that first deal, they couldn’t believe it. They got 20,000 new subscribers from New England alone. They told [HBO CEO] Michael Fuchs there was a big upside for HBO in boxing. When Fuchs left HBO, it carried on well because Seth carried the torch to Fuchs’ successor, Jeff Bewkes.”

Lou DiBella, hall of fame promoter, former HBO Sports Vice President in Charge of Programming, at HBO from 1989 to 2000: “I started as the lawyer for HBO East Coast original programming. I was supposed to have a job with the New York Yankees. I was to interview with George Steinbrenner, and I got a call from Steinbrenner’s secretary saying I was too young, because I was 29 years old and he didn’t want to hire a general counsel in his 20s. I got really upset when I was canceled. Steinbrenner’s secretary said, ‘I don’t know if this helps you, but the guy who is going to be offered the job was going to be interviewing for HBO Sports.’”

“In the 1990s, we became a juggernaut.”

“I was already a huge boxing fan. That day, I literally snuck into the HBO Building and hung out outside the general counsel’s office at HBO begging for an interview. He talked to me a few minutes and found me amusing, and he sent me to Seth Abraham. That was a Friday afternoon. The next Monday, I got the job. I took a huge pay cut to take the job from the law firm where I was working. I was with very smart, ambitious fucking people [at HBO]. And we were all young. Mark Taffet was in HBO’s financial area and eventually worked for me. Ross Greenburg was great and had great people working for him. He was winning all sorts of Emmys. We were doing numbers like the Sopranos and Sex in the City.

Julius Caesar is an interesting analogy when it comes to Seth, because there were a lot of young, smart people below him looking to take Seth’s position. Seth and I didn’t end well back then, frankly. We’re friends now. Part of the reason why I left was that there was talk inside the company that Seth was not going to be renewed. They had told me not to take another job elsewhere. I believed I was going to get Seth’s job. I’ll admit it. I was ambitious. I wanted Seth’s job. I’m not going to lie. 

HBO produced a pay-per-view smash with the “Battle for the Ages” between Evander Holyfield and George Foreman in 1991. (Photo by Focus on Sport/Getty Images)

“Then I found out Seth wasn’t leaving. I also got a sense that they weren’t so clear with me. When it became clear I wasn’t going to get it, I left. I had a run in with Jeff Bewkes, who was the head of HBO. I did not want to stay under those circumstances. I appreciate Seth now. Everyone was jockeying to be the next guy. It becomes hard when you’re the boss. In 20-20 hindsight, I think Seth did a remarkable job managing very difficult but talented people. Seth knew he had super-talented people working for him. We were all a handful, in fairness to Seth. I was a handful, I’ll admit. I was young. I was rising quickly. I was young and had a young man’s ego. I didn’t have the benefit of experience. I could have done better managing relationships. I could have played my politics far better. Honestly, I was never a great politician. It’s not who I was. My passion and my inability to be dishonest got in the way. I say too much what I think most of the time. I tend to be overly transparent. I found out, in time, I’m a much better boss than working for someone else. 

“There are things I could have done differently communicating. There is not a lot of what I would have done differently professionally. I don’t care if this sounds egomaniacal, but I’m going to be honest: I thought I was fucking great at my job. I changed the nature of that job. I wanted to make the programming. If I had to eat a mandatory, I better be getting a megafight next, if it was a bad mandatory. 

“A lot of what I did was forcing big fights, forcing meaningful fights. When I got to HBO, there were no little fighters fighting on HBO. When I say little, I mean below lightweight. We started getting into the lower weight classes and we started Boxing After Dark. HBO was already a powerhouse in boxing when I got there. It’s why I wanted to work there. In the 1990s, we became a juggernaut.”

Ross Greenburg, former president of HBO Sports (2000 to 2011), at HBO from 1978 to 2011: “I was the second employee of the HBO Sports department, and in 1985 I became the executive producer and president from 2000 to 2011. I came from ABC Sports, where I was a freelance assistant to the producer. I witnessed the Roone Arledge style of sports producing, which was pretty revolutionary at the time. So when I got to HBO, Michael Fuchs was the president of programming and he was a real boxing fan. 

“In the early years of HBO, Don King had come to HBO with his closed-circuit events, Frazier-Foreman and then Ali-Foreman. They were both broadcast on HBO. Since it had so few subscribers then, it was felt that it wouldn’t impact the closed-circuit numbers. HBO started in its infancy with these mega events. 

Frazier-Foreman was the first fight to be shown on HBO. (Photo by Herb Scharfman /Sports Illustrated via Getty Images)

“Michael Fuchs saw there was an opening because the networks were getting out of boxing. I guess that was because the networks were having trouble selling advertising, and advertisers were buying rounds two through 15. Boxing was not conducive to selling ads, because you never knew if a fight would end in one round. That was a huge problem, and price tags were getting pretty big. Michael Fuchs saw that opening. HBO couldn’t compete with the networks when it came to the NFL, NBA, MLB, but we could grab prizefights for much less dollars. 

“In the late 1970s when I got there, I remember one of the early fights was the tripleheader featuring Leon and Michael Spinks. I produced Ray Leonard’s fight against Dick Eklund up in Boston, which was a monumental moment in HBO boxing. Then, of course, Marvin Hagler came along and we signed a three-fight deal for a million dollars with Hagler. That really started the drum roll.”

Thomas Hauser, hall of fame boxing writer and HBO consultant (2012-2019): “HBO Boxing became great for several reasons. First, it had the support of senior management, which started with Michael Fuchs and continued with Jeff Bewkes. They were sports fans, and they wholeheartedly supported HBO Sports and HBO Boxing with their checkbook. It’s the checkbook Seth Abraham had that allowed him to build something great. He had the full support of senior management and a huge, huge budget. 

“Second, you had two people at the top of HBO Sports, Seth Abraham and Lou DiBella, who were committed to the boxing program and understood it. Seth understood boxing. He understood the sport and the business. But he said to me once, ‘I became a much better boss when I came to understand and accept the fact that Lou knew more about boxing than I did.’ Not necessarily the business of boxing, but the sport of boxing. They worked perfectly together. They were committed to making the best fights they possibly could for HBO. Lou had HBO’s checkbook and his passion and understanding, but he also had Seth’s guidance.

“[Seth Abraham] wanted the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world, the heavyweight champion, the fight of the year and the most exciting fighter to all be on HBO. He got that regularly.”

“I remember Seth telling me a story once about being at odds with [promoter] Dan Goossen. Dan came into the office to negotiate some deal. And Dan being Dan, he refused to shake hands with Seth. He told Seth, ‘I’ll do business with you, but I won’t shake hands with you.’ Seth told Dan that if he wouldn’t shake hands, the meeting was over. He wasn’t going to accept that. Then Seth said to himself, ‘Our subscribers really don’t care who I might be at odds with. They want to see the best fights they can possibly see.’ 

“That’s what Seth was committed to doing. He had this guideline that, at any given time, he wanted the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world, the heavyweight champion, the fight of the year and the most exciting fighter to all be on HBO. He got that regularly. He and Lou made very, very good fights together. And they had a great delivery system to the public. Ross Greenburg did a superb job producing the fights. Marc Payton was a brilliant director. They had a wonderful announcing team that evolved. Barry Tompkins was quite good. But once you got to Jim (Lampley), Larry (Merchant), Harold (Lederman), and either Emanuel (Steward) or George (Foreman), that was a great team. That to me was the high point of boxing during my lifetime. 

“Their biggest fights were on pay-per-view, but they also had a lot of great fights on regular HBO. Look at what you have today on pay-per-view that, in the past, would have been on regular HBO. Most of the pay-per-view fights on HBO were very special. The Seth Abraham-Lou DiBella era was the height of HBO Boxing. They worked together quite well. And Seth let Lou be Lou. Lou would come into the office at 2 in the afternoon and be there until 10 at night. Those aren’t regular corporate hours. Lou left HBO in May 2000 and Seth left shortly after that.”

Jim Lampley, hall of fame boxing broadcaster, HBO’s blow-by-blow commentator (1988-2018): “I was in my 14th year of working for ABC Sports in 1987. I had won a talent hunt in 1974 to become one of the first two people to ever stand on the sidelines of a football game with a camera and a microphone. I had come to the network to do exactly that, ostensibly for one season, then to be replaced by someone else the following year. 

“I wound up doing three seasons on the sidelines of college football because they chose not to replace me, but rather to keep me there while I continued developing other assignments. I was on ABC’s Wide World of Sports; I was doing feature reporting at the Olympics. I had a broad and proliferating career at ABC Sports. 

The HBO ringside crew, circa 1991. Left to right: Harold Lederman, Larry Merchant, George Foreman and Jim Lampley. (Photo by Focus on Sport/Getty Images)

“By 1987, I was in the very propitious position of looking down the road with older announcers – most particularly, Jim McKay and Howard Cosell – being out the door. There were going to be very promising and favorable assignments toward which I had the inside track at that moment. And then, suddenly, the network was sold from an individual owner named Leonard Goldenson to a stations management group named Capital Cities Broadcasting. Capital Cities arrived with one major objective, which was to maximize the owned stations and make a great deal of money off them. For the first few months after Cap Cities came through the door, I thought everything was going to be fine.

“They took the guy who had been running stations for ABC, a guy named Dennis Swanson, and moved him in charge of sports. Dennis Swanson arrived at the sports division in late-1986, early-1987 with one major predilection about the division, which was: Who is Jim Lampley, and why are we paying him all this money? He hated my style. He hated my youth. He hated my on-air work. He hated everything about me. I had a very solid contract that went on for years to come. It also included eye-catching and favorable guarantees for the Calgary Olympics in 1988. Swanson openly told my agent, ‘I’m going to find a way to get rid of Jim. I’m going to create pressures which will force him to walk away from his contract here.’ 

“His first tactic to get me to walk away from ABC was to assign me to become the ringside blow-by-blow boxing commentator. He had it in his head there was no way I would fit in boxing. Boxing would be allergic to me. I would be allergic to boxing and the public would see me as the sort of extended inheritor of Cosell, because the network’s boxing image was still related to Cosell, even though he had not called a fight in a few years. Pretty early in 1987, I was suddenly assigned to be the boxing blow-by-blow guy working with an in-house executive who had never worked on the air before, Alex Wallau, who had the right knowledge credentials to do it, though he had never worked on-air experience. What Swanson did not pay attention to was that the network had signed an introductory, look-see contract with a 19-year-old heavyweight from upstate New York whose name was Mike Tyson.

“I was standing at ringside thinking, ‘Oh my God, look at what I’ve happened into here by accident.”

“The very first fight I ever called on TV was Mike Tyson vs. Jesse Ferguson, in Troy, New York. In the fourth round, Tyson exploded Ferguson’s nose with an uppercut, splattered his nose. There was blood all over the ring, and in the fifth round the referee stopped the fight. 

“Alex went into the ring to do the post-fight interview with Mike, and the first question was about the uppercut. Mike said the purpose of the uppercut, Cus D’Amato had taught [him], was to drive the opponent’s nose bone into his brain, ‘So I was trying to drive his nose bone into his brain.’ I was standing at ringside thinking, ‘Oh my God, look at what I’ve happened into here by accident. This guy’s not only the No. 1 quote machine in boxing, he’s going to be the No. 1 quote machine in sports.’ Sure enough, in the next few weeks, they all began tumbling out: ‘Boxing is a hurt business,’ ‘Everybody’s got a plan until they get punched in the face.’ Suddenly, Tyson became a global phenomenon, and I was the person who was narrating that phenomenon.

“Eventually, HBO, having all the ambitions HBO had at that time in regard to boxing, with Seth Abraham in charge of the sports division, decided that HBO absolutely had to sign Mike and get him away from ABC the instant the contract expired. They did that. Seth was already into the process with my agent getting me to leave ABC and come to work at HBO. In early 1988, I signed a contract with HBO to call all the boxing matches and host Wimbledon tennis every year. 

via Ultimate Mike Tyson on YouTube:

“I’m very proud to say Barry Tompkins is one of the most graceful, beautiful men alive. Our friendship survives to this day. He has never, ever said anything remotely critical of me for being in the fortuitous position to wind up getting his chair. It is the way the business works. It was a colossal offer. I don’t allow my conscience to bother me, because it was a colossal offer. Anyone would have taken it. But I will always be constantly impressed with the graceful, gentlemanliness of Barry Tompkins, who did nothing other than smile and pat me on the back. 

“I came in the door at HBO and began calling fights, calling Tyson fights, working with Ray Leonard and Larry Merchant. Two years later, we were in Tokyo for what became the biggest upset in boxing history, which was poetic in my life. The very first prizefight I ever attended was Sonny Liston versus Cassius Clay, February 25, 1964, in Miami Beach, when I was 14 years old. I had bought a ticket with lawn-mowing and car-washing money saved over several months to go to that fight. In the late rounds of Mike Tyson-Buster Douglas, when the outcome looked obvious, I was sitting there thinking, ‘Oh my God, you couldn’t write this into a life story.’ The first live prizefight I ever attended was the biggest upset in boxing history, and now I’m calling, for the entire American audience, the fight that is going to be its successor as the biggest upset in boxing history. You can’t resist thinking I was meant to be there.”

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