By Chris Williams: Ken Hershman, the the executive vice president and GM of Showtime Sports, will be the replacement for Ross Greenburg for the head of sports at HBO. This means that Hershman is leaving Showtime and that’s not good for boxing fans, because Showtime was catching up to HBO ever so slightly in the recent years but mostly because of HBO’s bad habit at times of cramming bad fights and fighters down the throats of fans.
Hopefully, Hershman can set up some better fights for boxing fans and get away from having particular dull fighters shown over and over and over again when boxing fans can’t stand these particular fighters. In theory this will be a good thing, but it’s not good if Showtime is now going to sink back down and start putting on garbage fights.
There’s not a big pool of named fighters that these two networks can fight over, but they need to be better at picking out interesting would be stars and put their fights on instead of guys that just aren’t worth it. What boxing fans don’t need is Hershman putting on a fighter that is marked carefully to be a star and yet is kept away from guys that can beat him just to make the guy a PPV star. I think I’ve seen this kind of thing with HBO in the past, and it’s kind of a turn off.
Hershman did some good things at Showtime, such as the Showtime tournament which has been good and bad. It worked with the super middleweights, but seemed to fall flat when he tried it for a second time with the bantamweights. That I thought was a bad idea that should have been dismissed in the planning stages. Had I been on a board of decision making, I’d have voted that idea down. But Hershman did well with guys like IBF super middleweight champion Lucian Bute to show his fights on Showtime.
It’s too bad they Bute never got around to fighting anyone good, because it would have been nice to see him fight someone like Chad Dawson, Bernard Hopkins, Carl Froch or Andre Ward instead of a lot of mediocre talent in boring one-sided fights on Showtime. I would have voted against having Bute’s fights televised on Showtime if he was going to be getting nice mismatches. That was a waste and Hershman should have put his foot down on that. Clearly, Hershman did some good things but he also did a lot of stuff that wasn’t so brilliant in my view, so I’m not really thinking he’s going to be walking on water at HBO. He’s human and he does something good and other things that just make me shake my head and wonder about the guy.
We could end up seeing Hershman putting MMA stuff on HBO, because he was doing that with Showtime. I really don’t think that’s going to help boxing any because it’s going to put boxing in competition with fights that often last one a couple of minutes at best and article action packed but bloody and messy.
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