Paramount to End Showtime Sports, Boxing After 37-Year Run
Five years after HBO televised its last boxing match, fellow pay-TV pioneer Showtime is about to follow suit. Effective at the end of this year, parent company Paramount will shutter the Showtime Sports unit, bringing an end to the premium cable channel’s 37-year affiliation with the sweet science.
In a memo to employees, Showtime/Paramount Media networks president and CEO Chris McCarthy said the company “will not be moving forward with boxing or other content produced by Showtime Sports,” leaving it with one final pay-per-view event, a super middleweight bout set to air on Saturday, Nov. 25.
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McCarthy assured staffers that Paramount’s decision “is not a reflection of the work the team and our partners have done, rather a reality of the world evolving and our shifting content priorities.” Paramount will re-allocate the resources that had sustained the sports unit to develop more scripted series content, which the company believes is key to driving subscriber acquisitions.
In a separate statement issued Tuesday afternoon, Showtime Sports president Stephen Espinoza echoed McCarthy’s assessment, noting that the decision was Paramount’s to make. “While today’s news is certainly difficult and disappointing, it is entirely out of our control,” Espinoza wrote.
The decision to shut down Showtime Sports comes as Paramount is looking to offload the mixed martial arts promotion Bellator MMA, which it purchased (under the old Viacom umbrella) for some $50 million back in 2011.
All told, Showtime has produced north of 750 cards, featuring some 2,000 bouts, since its first televised event in 1986. The network couldn’t have asked for a better opener, as Marvelous Marvin Hagler knocked out challenger John “The Beast” Mugabi in the 11th round, in what may have been the most brutal bout of the middleweight champ’s storied career. (Tommy “Hitman” Hearns KO’d James Shuler 73 seconds into the undercard bout.)
Hagler retained his WBA, WBC and IBF middleweight belts, but the Mugabi fight would prove to be his final victory in the ring. A year later, Hagler would lose a 12-round split decision to Sugar Ray Leonard, marking the end of his 14-year career in the ring.
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