Bob Arum recently revealed that Ari Emanuel had attempted to buy Top Rank Boxing’s extensive fight library.
Taking advantage of boxing media being in Las Vegas for Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Conor McGregor, Top Rank Boxing and ESPN have announced a four-year partnership, which promises to “bring boxing back into the mainstream.” Financial details were not disclosed, but unlike Al Haymon’s Premier Boxing Champions, it’s not a time-buy arrangement, and it essentially shuts the door for good on Top Rank’s relationship with HBO. The deal includes 16 cards per year on ESPN, although we will occasionally see some bouts on pay-per-view. Additional anchor programming, content on an over-the-top (OTT) streaming service, plus access to the Top Rank archives is all part of this package.
Notable Top Rank fighters include world champions Terence Crawford, Vasyl Lomachenko, and Oscar Valdez, and obviously the biggest name on the roster is Manny Pacquiao. Olympians Shakur Stevenson and Ireland’s Michael Conlan are a couple of prospects that Top Rank is looking to build up as the next generation of combat sports stars.
There’s a lot to unpack for what this means for the boxing landscape, and perhaps this is an indicator that we won’t be seeing the UFC going to ESPN any time soon, but we’ll get to that on another day. What is really interesting from a UFC perspective is this little tidbit Arum revealed to The Hollywood Reporter. UFC owner Ari Emanuel apparently had approached Arum about purchasing the Top Rank library just a few months after WME-IMG had acquired the UFC:
The week before Thanksgiving 2016, Bob Arum, the founder of Top Rank Boxing who has been in the fight game since 1966 (when he started as Muhammad Ali's promoter), was at home in Las Vegas when he got a call from Ari Emanuel. "He says, 'I'm getting on a plane,' " recalls Arum, 85. When they met Nov. 22, Emanuel told Arum, who was joined by his stepson and Top Rank president Todd duBoef, that he wanted to buy the Top Rank library, which is stocked with iconic fights, including the 1975 "Thrilla in Manila" between Ali and Joe Frazier.
Just a few months earlier, in July 2016, Emanuel's WME-IMG had purchased UFC, the Vegas-based mixed martial arts league, for a staggering $4 billion, and there have been hints the company might be interested in a foray into boxing. ("We're sniffing around," UFC president Dana White recently told THR.) After Emanuel asked Arum and duBoef about their plans for Top Rank, they told him to speak to their agents at CAA, and the conversation ended there.
What Arum didn't tell Emanuel was that Top Rank — working with CAA's Nick Khan and Evolution Media Capital's Alan Gold, who runs the sports rights division of the investment bank that is partly owned by CAA — already had taken a series of meetings with potential suitors (NBC, Fox and Amazon) and was a month into a courtship with Disney's ESPN. "I could have said, 'Just give me the money,' " says Arum. "But I want to build something."
Presumably acquiring the Top Rank library would’ve meant another marquee addition to the UFC Fight Pass collection. Classic matchups from the TR archives include Marvin Hagler vs. Thomas Hearns, Muhammad Ali vs. George Foreman, Oscar De La Hoya vs. Ike Quartey, and countless other bouts. If this is true, it certainly feels like “Zuffa Boxing” is an avenue that the UFC’s current owners are more than serious about exploring.
