Hbo Says It Had Doubts About Mccall

For seven weeks before Friday night’s Oliver McCall-Lennox Lewis boxing spectacle, HBO Sports had serious doubts about McCall’s state of mental health.

So why didn’t HBO pull out?

McCall had previous drug and legal woes. He had been arrested Dec. 15 at a Nashville hotel for throwing a Christmas tree and spitting on a police officer.

By the time of the Dec. 18 news conference to promote the fight, McCall was dividing his days between training and drug rehabilitation. HBO’s suspicions grew stronger when McCall did not show up that day and when it got no access to talk to the fighter for a pre-fight feature.

At that news conference, Lou DiBella, an HBO vice president, said McCall’s availability to fight Feb. 7 “strikes me as somewhat strange.”

Monday, Seth Abraham, the president of Time Warner Sports, the parent company of HBO Sports, said, “HBO felt the fight should not go on.”

Whatever the liability - even with its $4 million investment at stake, and Lewis, its fighter, losing his chance at a title - HBO should have exited.

“They had every right not to televise it if they feel it shouldn’t have gone on,” said Don King, whose $9 million bid to promote the fight was denied by a New Jersey judge in favor of a $6 million purse bid from Main Events. “Why not let me fall on my face with $9 million?”

If a man’s health was at stake, why not make the wise move to protect McCall, who cried between Rounds 3 and 4, and offered no defense in Rounds 4 and 5? McCall’s explanation that he was tiring Lewis with rope-a-dope tactics and King’s insistence that McCall is a regular crier, are contrived, at best.

Not doing the right thing by McCall involved issues of law and competition, not heart. HBO had a contract with Lewis it did not want to violate, and Lewis was bound to fight McCall by the World Boxing Council, which is known to have a close, enduring relationship with King. If HBO had pulled out, Lewis might never be ranked high enough to merit a title fight again.

“If we said no to McCall, we might have done right by the fighter, but we’d be criticized,” said Dino Duva, president of Main Events.

The evidence of McCall’s problems was too circumstantial, said Abraham, to make a bold, sympathetic move in favor of a boxer from King’s stable.

“If Don said the fighter is OK, and we can’t contradict it, it’s circumstantial,” Abraham said. “We were suspicious, but we had no knowledge. We had no access to him. And we had a contract. We had backed Main Events’ purse bid, and were obligated to televise the fight if it went on.”

To their credit, HBO and Duva tried to persuade the WBC to replace McCall with Zeljko Mavrovic of Croatia, with a guarantee to let McCall face the winner. The WBC said no. Said Duva: “King obviously told them, ‘McCall’s my guy, he’s fighting for the title.’ The next guy is not a King guy.”

While HBO and Duva’s defense bespeak a need to protect Lewis, King’s defense seems calculated to make sure McCall’s purse is not permanently withheld by the Nevada Athletic Commission. How, after all, will McCall repay the $434,114 advanced by King, when he still has the promotional rights, for training and rehab expenses, without the purse?

King said McCall’s troubles preceding the bout were not enough to pull him out and that McCall’s willingness to enter rehab “and face his problem” was reason to keep him in.