SULAIMAN CALLS FOR MEETING OF BOXING PROMOTERS
By Ronnie Nathanielsz
PhilBoxing.com
Wed, 31 Dec 2008
World Boxing Council president Don Jose Suilaiman is calling for a boxing promoters ?Summit? in Chicago in the second or third week of April.
Sulaiman, in an overseas conversation with www.insidesports.ph, Standard Today and Viva Sports from his home in Mexico said it was aimed at "bringing together all the promoters in the world.?
Sulaiman conceded that boxing ?is right now going through a very difficult moment because they (promoters) are fighting among themselves as never before and this is because of the HBO and Showtime intervention in boxing.?
The president of the premier professional boxing organization in the world accused HBO and Showtime of ?taking the power away from the organizations, they have signed exclusively some of the boxers and some of the promoters and the great majority of boxers and promoters have absolutely no benefit. They are trying to kick the boxing organizations out.?
Sulaiman said that after the world organizations provided promising fighters with breaks to further their careers HBO and Showtime who did nothing to discover and build talents ?only intervened in the super major fights.?
Posing the question ?what has happened to those fights?? he said except for the Manny Pacquiao ? Oscar De La Hoya which did well at the gate and also on pay-per-view despite being what Sulaiman called ?a one-sided fight, every other fight which was just a competition between two boxers with no title available was a total disaster.?
He claimed the TV ratings of those fights had ?dropped dramatically and the fights have been a bore.?
Sulaiman noted that ?a boxer is born dreaming of an Olympic gold medal or a world professional championship? and the absence of titles at stake ?make the television coverage fail.?
Pointing to the fact that several fighters including Pacquiao, De La Hoya, Roy Jones Jr, Calzaghe were all WBC champions and the use of these fighters in fights where no title was at stake showed they were ?using the name and prestige of the WBC? which helped these fighters become what they are today.
He accused the two networks of ?hardly recognizing the work of the WBC by stealing those boxers away from the WBC, promoting the fights for no title with one against the other which is not interesting for the public either.?
Sulaiman said ?who cares if Calzaghe defeated Roy Jones, only in England perhaps. But if there was a title and they competed for a title, that?s a different story.?
He blasted the television companies alleging ?they are not boxing experts. They are money-making experts? and vowed ?as long as I live I will not accept that.?
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