Following the recent lawsuit from Oscar De La Hoya’s Golden Boy Promotions against boxing manager and Premier Boxing Champions chief Al Haymon getting dismissed by a federal judge in court, we caught up with his Vice President of Communications at PBC – Tim Smith.
Boxing News and Views spoke with Smith this week on the phone.
Starting off in our conversation I asked him now that the lawsuit has been dismissed will there be more potential for Al Haymon and Oscar De La Hoya to work together in the future.
Smith went into detail on the subject:
“I think the fallacy that was put out by various people, you know, Al Haymon has never had a problem working with other promoters. Let me put it this way. Two of Canelo Alvarez’ last three opponents have been Haymon managed boxers. That being Amir Khan and Julio Cesar Chavez Jr (in May 2017). Does that sound like Al Haymon has a problem working with Golden Boy?”
Touching on fights that Haymon has made in the past and upcoming in 2017, Smith continued:
“Considering that Canelo Alvarez is their cash cow, if Al Haymon had a problem working with Golden Boy I don’t think he’d be helping them out with their cash cow. Part of the fallacy I think on the part of people that have agendas against PBC, against Al or whatever, is to make him out to be the bogeyman. To say: ‘Oh he doesn’t want to work with anybody. He doesn’t want to make fights with anybody.’ But you look at the fights
that he’s made. He’s made fights with (promoter) Bob Arum, Terence
Crawford fought (Haymon managed) John Molina just back in December
(2016). You know, GGG (middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin), he’s made fights through GGG’s people – Tom Loeffler. (Haymon manged) Danny Jacobs is fighting Golovkin on a HBO pay per view March 18th.”
He added:
“It just seems like people buy into a narrative without any investigation or understanding of what’s going on. Al is making fights with people.
He’s never stopped making fights with people. As a matter of fact,
the only discussion of anybody saying they weren’t going to do
business with Al, wasn’t from Al, it came from Arum back a few years
ago at the same time the guy from HBO Ken Hurshman said he wasn’t
going to do any more business with Golden Boy or Al Haymon. You never heard Al Haymon saying: ‘I’m not doing any business with HBO or I’m never going to do business with anybody.’ It’s always been a one
sided kind of thing where people have said they would not do business
with Al.”
He concluded:
“Al’s never said he’s not going to do any business with
anybody because that would bring harm to his clients. Why would he do
that?Why would he harm his clients? He’s supposed to be working in
their best financial interest. So you can’t close off a door and say
your not going to work with anybody.”
