Hbo-Showtime Battle The Best Fight Out There
The Nov. 4 pay-per-view war between TVKO’s Evander Holyfield-Riddick Bowe bout and KingVision/Showtime Event Television’s Mike Tyson-Buster Mathis Jr. fight is getting good and nasty and personal.
What filthy fun.
“I foresee Chernobyl,” said Seth Abraham, president of Time Warner Sports, the parent of TVKO and HBO Sports. He has staked out his position: he will not move his fight to another date; Showtime and its partner, the MGM Grand, cannot persuade Don King to do so and John Horne, not King, refuses to see how much more money can be made by moving Tyson-Mathis Jr. to December.
“I find it interesting that Seth has so much knowledge about our partners, yet he’s not even talking to us,” said Mac Lipscomb, S.E.T.’s general manager. “We are equal partners with everybody in the process.”
Lipscomb referred to HBO and Abraham as “has-beens in the business.”
In a Time Warner private dining room Thursday, Abraham grimly vented his frustrations that centered on his disintegrated relationship with King, once his boxing partner on HBO. But Abraham withheld some of boxing’s pie from King, recalling: “I’d never let him have more than 70 percent of our boxing budget. Find the last Showtime fight that wasn’t with Don King.”
Abraham said that King has always tested him, from waking him up at 1 in the morning to negotiate a point to “hurling himself at me like a guided missile until he stopped an inch from my face” at another negotiation.
There was little reason for this odd couple to talk again until recently. When he negotiated with King to bring Tyson back to HBO, Abraham said, “He made it clear that he blamed me for his problems with the government.”
King goes on trial in October on federal wire-fraud charges. “The last time we talked, Don accused me of things I did to him in 1876,” Abraham said.
The King-Abraham friendship - they once shared a Passover seder table! - has frazzled since the late 1980s largely because of comments by HBO’s Larry Merchant that King deemed anti-Tyson. King wanted Merchant out; Abraham refused. “Don’s mistake is misjudging Time Warner’s resolve,” Abraham said.
There are considerable and assorted claims about who should move off Nov. 4 - S.E.T. says it was there first; TVKO says it can’t move because the outdoor Caesars Palace arena is too cold in December - and about who forced whom to move off prior dates. Acknowledging the fading possibility that S.E.T. will not budge, Abraham vowed to load up his silo of missiles - Holyfield, Bowe, George Foreman and Oscar de la Hoya - to counter-program S.E.T. cards, date after date.
“Draw your own conclusions,” Abraham said.
“Is this spilt milk?” Lipscomb asked. “Because he has lesser talent? I can’t understand why he’s so frustrated.”
King returned rhetorical fire, accusing Abraham of praising the value of the three major heavyweight titles when HBO fighters held them, but scorning them now that King controls them.
A more mundane skirmish was silliness such as mobile billboards parking in front of Time Warner and HBO buildings to promote the Tyson-McNeeley fight.