PROMOTER Eddie Hearn addressed the nascent World Boxing Super Series, which is reaching the end of the first round of fights in its quarter-final stage.
“I’m looking at it as an opportunity for our fighters. Many promoters would go I’m not putting our fighters in. But I’m actually thinking we’ve got so many fighters and the money’s good,” he told Boxing News. “It’s not like you lose your fighter. You put him in it and he could come out the other end a superstar and they’ve done all the work for you. There’s a long way to go but certainly the production’s really good. I think they missed a trick not putting Eubank on ITV 1 and this one [Groves-Cox], I think that would have huge. Because then the semi becomes really big.
“But I don’t think ITV are looking to make an investment into boxing. They’re looking to see how boxing can make them money commercially.”
These quarter-finals have been on ITV Box Office, rather than free-to-air television. “Back to back pay per views, the great news is it takes all the pressure off me because I was Dr. Evil pay-per-view, now there’s one a week. I keep saying to people look at the comparisons of the cards that we’re putting on,” Hearn said.
“As far as the tournament goes, it’s good. The correct format is the cruiserweight format where you’ve got every world champion in. So you can honestly say the winner of that tournament is the best cruiserweight in the world and is the undisputed champion. That’s great, if they can get more weight divisions and do that, great. The problem is the commercially bigger divisions, heavyweight, welterweight.”
It would require an astronomic sum for instance for Anthony Joshua to enter a heavyweight version. “Joshua is the problem, the others would probably go in,” his promoter said. “Fighters who are commercially big like to be in control of their business and what they’re doing.”
