Boxing Broadcasts in The Modern Age: Pt. 1 - The Broadcasters

List of contents:
1. HBO
2. What's new?
3. Showtime Boxing
4. Sky Sports Boxing
5. TNT Sports
6. DAZN
7. ESPN (+Top Rank?)
8. Foreign-language broadcasts

HBO

I miss HBO Boxing so goshdarn much. Their wonderful Thrilla in Manila documentary is how I fell in love with the sport in the first place. And I learned so much from countless hours of listening to Manny Steward, George Foreman, Roy Jones, and Andre Ward. Ok, Larry Merchant could be biased and overly flowery with his language sometimes but he was a knowledgeable figure and his old school journo background equipped him to elevate the grandeur of an already exciting evening. But you know what else they were great at? They were fun. The familiar call of "Harold, how do you have it after 3?" followed by the wildly enthusiastic response "OK, JIM!" lives in my mind rent free. I miss hearing quaint Southern interjections in the country twang of Big George or Roy, sometimes you just need confirmation that "he put some mustard on that one!" after a big punch lands. Max Kellerman, who I'm sure I'd get along with swell in person, was also present.

As instrumental as the visible and audible personalities were, I would be remiss not to give a special mention to HBO's Ross Greenburg, whose efforts as a producer of broadcasts and executive producer of television media kept a gold standard shining like a fabled city upon a hill. And in the skies above that city, he would find stars and superstars for us to gaze at.

What's new?

The recent reports about #PBConPrime (emphasis on 'Con') and their planned production line-up got me thinking about how much my enjoyment of boxing has decreased since HBO left the game. What would it take for someone to reach their level? Or ideally to surpass it. Let's look at some of the competitors at play in Part 1 and then the more practical/technical aspects of a boxing broadcast in Part 2.

Showtime Boxing

I'll start with the biggest positive. I really liked Al Bernstein as an analyst. He clearly loves the sport and his passion for it was infectious. The 'keys to victory' summary for what each fighter would rely on was also a great way to signpost what to look out for, for both for casual viewers who may never have seen a fight and experienced viewers who wouldn't keep up with every fighter's respective style.

I didn't care for many of the other personalities they had. Not that I disliked them, just that they didn't leave as strong an impression. Actually, a number of years ago I met Paulie Malignaggi and he had the most limp, noodle-wristed handshake I ever had the misfortune of experiencing. That's nothing to do with his broadcasting abilities, it just says a lot about him as a person yknow? My biggest gripe with Showtime was that, for all their attempts to emulate the HBO formula, they missed out on a crucial characteristic - keeping it real.

It's simply impossible for every fight to be a classic. And the more fights you watch, the more duds you'll get. The HBO teams over the years would be subject to a complete stinker occasionally and there was entertainment value in their dry remarks about how much they can't wait for it to be over. Besides the sarcasm and quips, it was funny to see them try to stave off boredom amongst themselves. They knew when a fight was bad, felt comfortable saying it was bad, and shared the same hope as the audience that the next one would be better. An admirably honest approach.

On the other hand, Showtime (the one of the 2010s and beyond at least) was a corporate hype machine to its dying days. Every fighter was a legend, legend-killer, or legend/legend-killer in the making. Every trash 12-rounder that was getting audibly booed before the bell to end the 6th was "a real display of the sweet science" that the bloodthirsty troglodytes in attendance could not possibly appreciate.
Every no-hoper "B-side" on All Access was going to be 'the 1 in 21-1'.

HBO would hype up fighters beforehand as well but they knew there was no point keeping up the jig when they already had your money and attention. Showtime relentlessly insulted and attacked the intelligence of boxing viewers. I felt so much schadenfreude watching the Tank Davis vs Ryan Garcia card last year because these same people who had spent years pretending that being an undefeated fighter was a mark of greatness now had to run hours of damage control in advance of Ryan Garcia losing his '0'. Let me spell it out once and for all: there is no such thing as a great undefeated fighter.

All great fighters lose, because that's what happens when they face other great fighters.

"Somebody's 'O' has got to go!" was never a marketing term in the not-too-distant past, yet Showtime spun it as the height of matchmaking and the casual fan lapped it up. If they were capable of improving their product, they would've done so. Instead, just 8 years after Pacquiao-Mayweather and less than 6 months after Spence-Crawford, Showtime said goodbye to boxing entirely. iirc Dan Rafael chastised people on social media for celebrating their demise. Don't be too hard on him, it's just his obsequious nature. He's never formed a strong opinion of his own so seeing others express theirs is frightening for him. Oh well.

auf Wiedersehen, ShoBox. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Sky Sports Boxing

Formerly affiliated with ReMatchroom and currently trying to push the BOXXER stable, Sky has been one of the staples of UK boxing in recent times. It's been overseen by Adam Smith, who appointed himself as commentator for every fight. Smith doesn't seem like a bad guy but his commentary leaves a lot to be desired imo. Sometimes it's downright bizarre, though more often than not he sounds like he's calling fights on autopilot. Everything is shouty and loud. A touted prospect knocking out a nameless journeyman gets called like it's the 15th round of heavyweight title fight in a phonebooth. Everytime a boxer rises from the canvas we're treated to the same empty expression of "he looks to his corner as if to say [vapid psychobabble]".

If you want to speedrun liver poisoning, take a drink everytime you hear that a boring and uneventful fight is "a real technical display" or "one for the purists". This trope is one that his successors have gladly continued, though none of them have ever considered telling viewers what techniques are on display. All they're doing is reinforcing the notion that boxing is boring, and boxing at its best is supposed to be boring. They would never dare to do that for their other sports offerings because it's obviously a stupid thing to do when you're trying to sell an entertainment product.

They used to have Carl Froch on the co-comms and hearing him break down fights was what fully radicalised me to the notion that some boxers are just really bad at watching boxing. I remember one of his scorecards where he had four or five 10-10 rounds on a fight that, while not one-sided, certainly wasn't on a knife-edge. Plenty of scorecards by Sky pundits have made me raise an eyebrow or two, this might also explain why they never mention or explain what you're supposed to score a fight on. Any card could be someone's first time watching boxing and the impression casual fans are left with from Sky is that boxing is scored on vibes. Though tbf that isn't a million miles from the truth.

TNT Sports (formerly BT Sports)

If I'm not mistaken, they mostly deal with the Queensberry Promotions side of things. Their commentators tend to be footie commentators which is... fine? Not bad, not great, perfectly cromulent. A regular contributor is the one-man British boxing institution, Steve "*** *****" Bunce. I don't have the bassiest voice so maybe I shouldn't judge, but Buncey's voice often crescendos into an ear-piercing shrill. It just isn't something you expect from a larger gentleman. There's no reward for enduring his voice either. My blud just loves to waffle tirelessly. Despite his decades of experience as a radio broadcaster and writer too, meaningful insights or analysis are pitifully few and far between. His work on 5 Live Boxing for the BBC also devolves into tired after-dinner stories and man-down-the-pub anecdotes, Mike Costello was doing a lot of the heavy lifting on that show and his presence is sorely missed.

TNT are comparable to Sky in that they know the recipe for a competent and professional sports broadcast, they just haven't got all the right ingredients for a boxing broadcast and are making do with whatever is in the kitchen. The end result is not bad but with a few tweaks it could be better.

DAZN

The new home of Golden Boy and ReMatchroom. A few years ago I met a fancy-pants, big city lawyer who told me he worked for DAZN. From my reaction he gathered I hadn't heard of the company and then started to explain they were a sports streaming service. "Oh, DA-ZN!", I said, having just realised that it's pronounced 'da zone', and not 'day-zee-enn' as I'd been reading it.

New entrants looking to make a big splash have no choice but to believe that you have to spend money to make money. DAZN is certainly putting that to the test by posting annual 10-figure operating losses, they appear to be kept afloat entirely by the transatlantic oligarch Leonid Blavatnik. Somehow all that money isn't translating into production values, a DAZN broadcast without technical hiccups is like a Bethesda game without bugs. It doesn't feel like they're even trying. After all these years you'd think that basic things like audio mixing would be straightforward, yet multiple songs from the TV broadcast and in the arena overlapping each other is somehow not uncommon. It was par for the course when there was no sound whatsoever during the first few rounds of the Joshua-Helenius PPV headliner. This sheer incompetence has made me appreciate how easy other broadcasters make it look.

DAZN also has comically bad TrustPilot reviews, worse than Bethesda! A lot of people aren't happy with what they paid for and they're even more unhappy when they find out how hard it is to stop paying. But the business practice side of boxing will have to be a topic for another day.

As for their commentators, on the British side of things it was a real coup to get Mike Costello - one of only a few positives that DAZN can boast. Across the pond, I'm not a fan of Todd Grisham or Chris Mannix. They lack gravitas and that... how you say? Je ne sais quoi. On the fighter-calling-fights side of things, Sergio Mora is inoffensive. Gabriel Rosado can sound really disinterested sometimes. If you ask around you'll hear that Chris Algieri is one of the more highly-rated pundits and, unlike his split decision win over Ruslan Provodnikov, those plaudits are fully deserved. He's often the sole intelligent boxing voice on American DAZN broadcasts.

ESPN (+Top Rank?)

Another one of those "I actively try to keep up with boxing and even I get confused by this" situations. Am I so out of touch...? No. It's the boxing industry that's wrong. As far as I can tell, sometimes Top Rank has their own broadcasts separate to ESPN. Sometimes it's all Top Rank on ESPN. Is it to do with different broadcasts for domestic and international viewers? I'm not sure and it doesn't really matter.

They get the job done and front-man Tim Bradley is one of the more affable figures in modern boxing. Hearing Joe Tessitore makes me nostalgic for playing Fight Night. Mark Kriegel is definitely trying, but trying and succeeding are often two different things. I would rate ESPN as my go-to broadcaster but for one really annoying catch: commercials in between rounds.

If a cornerman makes a rousing speech or a fighter quits on his stool, you won't see it live on ESPN. Most of the time. Sometimes they don't cut away to commercials. It must be tricky selling ad time for boxing, not just because of the content, but also because there's no guarantee that a fight will last 12 rounds and give 11 one-minute spots. All I have to say is I hope that whoever came up with that idea steps on a LEGO. You can pay for ESPN+, a premium subscription service, but for some reason this doesn't mean no ads. Instead, it cuts away to a one-minute ad reminding you of all the sports you can watch with your ESPN+ subscription. Cutting away from fight night is jarring enough as is, repeatedly cutting to the same promo is downright maddening.

The other notable thing about ESPN is that they're in possession of the boxing film archive collected by Jim Jacobs and Bill Cayton. If I'm not mistaken, most of the old fights films that have been uploaded online were either ripped directly from home releases that licenced the ESPN archive or recorded from televised ESPN Classic episodes. You'd think they'd have found some better way to put it to use by now since DVD & Blu-ray sales peaked/plateaued years ago. My best guess is that a greater percentage of the less cumbersome Top Rank archive is digitised and that those 1970s-2000s fighters just hold more name recognition than Benny Leonard or Battling Nelson. imo celebrating the sport's rich history would go some way to giving the present some much-needed depth.

Foreign-language broadcasts

Sometimes fight coverage doesn't leave its country of origin, and with no English commentators present on the other side of the world, you have to make do with local talent. I mostly see this in Japanese, Latin American, and Russian boxing - on rare occasions do I come across South-East Asian or German commentary. Two things consistently strike me about these broadcasts. The first is that despite years of watching anime and Japanese boxing, I still don't know what they're saying most of the time (same goes for the other languages too). The second is that they do not feel the need to incessantly talk.

It's easy to blame that 'leave no dead air' approach of English-spoken television commentary on radio, but doing so misses an obvious fact. It wasn't always like this. Love him or loathe him, Howard Cosell is the most iconic voice in boxing commentary. And much to his credit, in spite of his deep desire to be loved and famed, he had a great sense for letting the action speak for itself. The same used to be conventional wisdom in other sports. After all, it's not like you get paid extra for saying more.

In some old footie matches, it was entirely normal to have minute-long stretches without a word spoken between two commentators. Interminably long by today's standards. Those commentators of yesteryear mostly knew the difference between radio and television, they could sense that it was redundant (and annoying) to simply say what you see.

Which brings me to the surprisingly excellent boxing coverage offered by the Francophone broadcaster, beIN SPORTS. My French is not as good as it used to be but I can still follow a half-decent amount of a conversation. What I like about these broadcasts firstly is that there are no advertisements between rounds. On the very same ESPN broadcasts where American audiences have to be told to buy a new burger or truck of some sort, French audiences see what's happening in the corner. The commentators also let things flow for admirable stretches of time, often declining to speak over ring entrances, ring announcer introductions, and much of the ring action as well. Their audio mixing is especially impressive too, where ESPN dampens crowd noise so that you can more clearly listen to hollow banter, beIN really makes you feel like... well, like you're actually IN the arena.

But what really won me over is that they stand above the petty politics that English language broadcasters strictly adhere to. Because they have no formal allegiances to the promoters (and those promoters tend to be monolingual), they're empowered to speak freely and holistically about boxing. The other broadcasters will typically try to avoid speaking about or promoting fighters that they aren't affiliated with and thankfully there's no such issue here.

It doesn't matter if a card is DAZN-exclusive, whatever happened on DAZN has wider implications for the sport - and the sport has to come first. If a robbery occurs, they'll call it out on the night and, unlike others, bring it up in their next few broadcasts as they recap newsworthy recent events - none of this "one and done" mindset that pay-per-views imprint on the public's relationship with boxing. And in an especially nice touch, they even play highlights from yesteryear (usually from the Top Rank Archive) when they have time to kill. Something to whet your appetite instead of being forced to watch broadcasters endlessly repeat themselves between sporadic shots of a boxer in their dressing room.

Ingenious? Common sense? A labour of love? Whatever the reason for this well-crafted package, they have a template that I would encourage English-language broadcasters to get inspired by. It's the best one and it doesn't feel like they're even flexing a muscle. Magnifique.

• I left out ProBoxTV because I've not yet found a compelling enough reason to watch one of their cards.
• I do not watch Youtuber/influencer boxing, it does not interest me.
• I'm absolutely dreading Netflix's live boxing debut in July.
• Never paid for BoxNation. Never will.
• Snoop Dogg commentating the Tyson-Jones exhibition was a hit with casual viewers but offered nothing much for people familiar with Snoop Dogg's quip repertoire.
• Former US President Donald Trump commentating an Evander Holyfield exhibition was interesting, say what you will about him but he is a long-time boxing fan.
• I don't have one bad word against Jim Watt.