The “Premier Boxing Champions” monster just keeps gobbling up territory. No longer content with moving from the new(ish) school of HBO and Showtime to the old(ish) school of network/free TV, it’s going even further back to an old(er) school (kinda?) in radio. Namely, satellite radio (which is newer school than regular radio).
This week a deal was announced where Sirius XM will broadcast PBC shows. It starts this weekend, with the best PBC card offered yet, headlined by junior welterweight champion Danny Garcia and Lamont Peterson. The team includes Randy Gordon, former editor of Ring Magazine, and Gerry Cooney, the ex-heayvweight. The best part? Sway! Sway will be the ringside reporter! Sway is in the picture above.
Here’s a quote about all this, from the news release:
“So many of the great moments in boxing history were experienced by fight fans through their radios. We’ll deliver that experience again on SiriusXM by bringing the sounds and excitement from ringside into those fans’ cars, homes and phones,” said Steve Cohen, SiriusXM’s SVP of Sports Programming. “This is a very exciting time for boxing. The creation of the Premier Boxing Champions series and the buzz around big fights and new stars has sports fans as enthusiastic as ever about the sport. We look forward to building on that resurgence by offering live broadcasts of these terrific events to listeners nationwide.”
We didn’t get much in the way of actual terms of the deal, so it’s unclear if this is a thing where PBC forked over some money; probably safe to assume they did, since they’re doing time buys with everybody else. Sirius XM is producing the broadcasts, though. [TQBR reached out to Sirius XM for comment Tuesday evening — this post will be updated if they answer.] {UPDATE: “We do not discuss the terms of our deals so we cannot share any details of our agreement with PBC,” said Andrew Fitzpatrick, vice president of communications for Sirius XM.}
One wonders when we hit the saturation point of too much boxing broadcasting, which is a weird sentence to type, given that before 2015 boxing was confined to just a few outlets.
Speaking of: The CBS debut for PBC was a serious drop-off from the NBC debut. It still beat hockey, so, not terrible. But the CBS show had a few things going against it that the NBC show didn’t. One, there was less novelty to it, since the return to network TV generated a lot of hype for the first NBC show. Two, it was a crappier card. And three, it didn’t have the same marketing push in advance that the NBC one did.
Still. Serious drop-off. Potentially worrisome, that.
