Quote Originally Posted by p4pking View Post
How would Roy singlehandedly have had so much as a role in it? He disappeared from the upper echelon of the sport 15 years ago... HBO has had plenty of top fighters and shown plenty of top cards since then, but they were slowly phasing boxing out for ages. I don’t know how theyre doing overall, but as was said they’ve always had far more lucrative programming.
Master was correct in his initial post/observation that my title asks if Roy killed boxing on HBO, but my post asks if Roy added to HBO boxing’s demise. My son would call that “click bait” (I think), but I really was only trying to keep the title short (not misrepresent). For the record, I think everyone has been correct in their observations of additional factors of the demise.

The point is that Roy changed the approach of fighters from fighting to get the long term contract on HBO, and then fighting the best like the suits wanted to fighting the best to get the contract and then minimizing risk by fighting inferior competition for as long as possible. Floyd used a similar strategy of minimizing risk (both in opponent selection and during the fight), but in my opinion Floyd was better at the game and fought better competition overall. This isn’t to say I think either guy was wrong, or not great, or scared...etc., just that both put money over what the fans wanted to see.