Dan Rafael New HBO Match Maker / Is HBO Promoting without a license?

[Kev]

Why is he not qualified? He knows the sport better then any other human being.

Also the promoters aren't promoters anymore. With a few exceptions, all they do is wait for premium cable money (HBO and Showtime) so that they do not have to take any financial risk of their own. It is the reason that there are less and less fighters with local followings.

THe Money that HBO and SHowtime pay, is so so so much greater then what they could earn, putting on untelivised cards like in the old days, that no promoter wants to take any risks.

Seriously?

He's a decent writer, but he's far too partial to particular fighters and he's never been in there or even been in a gym from an early age. He's not grown up around boxing people, so what he might see as having the makings of a good fight might not end up that way. Bear in mind that he was heavily pushing Bradley-Alexander & not Morales-Maidana. Now that reflects the view of 95% of us, but the fact remains that a professional matchmaker saw something in Morales-Maidana that had the makings of an excellent fight.

If HBO want to get a quality match-maker, they should try steal Bruce Trampler from Top Rank or something.

I disagree strongly with this. Alexander vs Bradley to all of us had the makings of being a possible fight of the year, two of America's hottest undefeated stars. There is no matchmaker on the planet who would have said 'Hang on guys, this fight between the top two fighters in the division is going to be a stylistic clash and Alexander won't show any heart so we should scrap this idea now'.

Everybody wanted to see that fight.

Now Morales Maidana again was a complete surprise, this time the other way. Morales did what his recent form suggested he couldn't. To say that a professional matchmaker could consistently gamble on putting fights such as this on and having them work out as fight of the year candidates every time is akin to gambling all your money on the stock exchange.

Neither of these results can be attributed, either in terms of blame of praise to any matchmaker. One fight that looked great on paper turned out to be a dud, the other, which looked like a mismatch turned out to be one of the years best brawls.

But no matchmaker would have rejected Bradley Alexander, and no matchmaker could consistently gamble on Morales Maidana type matchups and have them pay off.