On December 10, Terence Crawford knocked out David Avanesyan in the sixth round of a fight promoted in Crawford’s hometown of Omaha, Nebraska, by a virtually unknown company called BLK Prime. The promotion was destined from the start to lose millions of dollars and seemed to make no sense from a business point of view. The organizers have a track record of – shall we say – questionable business dealings. And the fight that fans wanted to see was Crawford vs. Errol Spence, not Crawford-Avanesyan.

Let’s dissect the mess.

Crawford is a complete fighter. He can box. He can punch. He transitions seamlessly from orthodox to southpaw and is equally effective from either stance. When he beat Julius Indongo at 140 pounds in 2017, he became the first champion to hold all four major sanctioning body belts in any weight class since 2006. He has been a fixture at or near the top of pound-for-pound lists for years. The only thing missing from his resume (which now shows 39 wins with 30 knockouts in 39 fights) is a signature win over another elite fighter.

Spence has long been the logical opponent for Crawford to fight. But the boxing business isn’t logical. As Carlos Acevedo wrote, “Boxing rarely yields to the wishes of the public. In the real world, fans would be the equivalent of consumers and no company in its right mind would ignore, much less insult, its customer base. Most companies are interested in developing a quality product and maintaining some kind of relationship with their clientele, who have purchasing power behind them. But promoters are impervious to market forces because market forces, for the most part, do not exist in boxing. It hardly matters if a ticket sells, a Nielsen point is produced, a pay-per-view is ordered. All a promoter needs to do is bend the ear of a network executive [or gullible investor], preferably one with little interest in quality control, and – voila! – he is flush. This is the business model to end all business models.”

Spence has consistently put a damper on prospects for Crawford-Spence. “Me and Terence Crawford are on different sides of the street,” Errol said in 2019. “He’s just signed with ESPN. I don’t fight for ESPN. I fight for Showtime or Fox. Terence Crawford has got to come across the street.”

“There’s no such thing as ‘across the street,” Crawford responded. “Back in the day, you never heard fighters say ‘across the street.’ What street? This is boxing. Everybody fights everybody.”

Then, this year, Crawford’s contract with Top Rank expired and he became a promotional free agent. It was an ugly parting with Terence suing Top Rank for alleged racial bias and breach of contract. The claim of racial bias seems unfounded and legally frivolous. Not having seen Crawford’s contract with Top Rank and a full accounting with regard to his fights, it’s impossible to voice an opinion with respect to the contract claim.

Regardless, the major impediment to making Crawford-Spence had been removed from the mix. Or so it seemed. The problem was that Premier Boxing Champions impresario Al Haymon [Spence’s de facto manager) continued to take negotiating positions that worked against making the fight.

More specifically, Haymon wanted Crawford to fight Spence on a percentage basis with no minimum guarantee. And according to Crawford, PBC refused to insert a clause in Terence’s contract that would have required financial transparency to ensure that he got an honest accounting.

Remarkably, Crawford was amenable to fighting without a guarantee. That’s how badly he wanted to fight Spence. But the lack of transparency was a sticking point.

“I never heard of a fighter ever taking zero guarantee in a fight,” Terence said in a November 1 Instagram Live session. “That is something that’s new to me, but that’s something that I was willing to do to make this fight happen. I told him, ‘All right, cool; I’ll take no guarantee. I’ll take the less end of the money. Whatever it is you want, I’ll take it because that’s how much confidence I got that I’m gonna beat that man. So even though I knew I was getting f*****, I just wanted a little transparency. I said, ‘Okay, if I’m gonna bet on myself, then I want a little transparency.’ I wanna know things that’s gonna affect my check. I wanna see if the numbers add up to what they tellin’ me. It’s just simple to me. To think that a person would go in a business with a person and this person would tell them, ‘Oh, well, I’m not gonna tell you how much we really made, but I’m gonna just give you this. You just gotta trust me.’ Come on, now. It don’t make no sense.”

Here one might note that asking a fighter of Crawford’s magnitude to fight with no guarantee and without full transparency sounds like Haymon was taking a play out of Don King’s old playbook.

Crawford also maintained that, at one point in the negotiations, two hedge funds offered to pay guaranteed purses of $25 million each to him and Spence but that, in his words, “Al told me straight up, ‘I’m not letting anybody touch this fight.'”

Maybe the hedge fund money was real. Maybe not. If it had been put in escrow, that wouldn’t have been Crawford and Spence’s problem. Then again, if the money had been put in escrow, Crawford and Spence would have had transparency. They would have known exactly how much money was there to be divided between them.

Bottom line . . . It appears as though Crawford wanted the fight and Team Spence didn’t. “I believe in my abilities and I believe in myself,” Terence said. “Errol Spence, he can’t say the same.”

Then the earth shifted. Attorney John Hornewer had been negotiating Crawford-Spence with Haymon and Showtime Sports president Stephen Espinoza on Crawford’s behalf. On October 20, Hornewer got a telephone call from Team Crawford telling him to stop. Later that day, Hornewer learned from news reports that Crawford and David Avanesyan had signed contracts to fight each other on December 10 at CHI Health Center in Omaha.

Avanesyan (Russian-born and now living in England) has beaten some good fighters but not any very good ones. One of his losses came by stoppage at the hands of Egidijus Kavaliauskas (who Crawford knocked out).

Crawford-Avanesyan was funded and streamed by a little-known subscription video-on-demand service called BLK Prime and was also available on traditional outlets. It was publicly stated that Crawford’s contract called for him to receive a $10 million purse with half of that amount having been placed in escrow as of October 20. This could have been an accurate number. More likely, it was an exaggeration for the sake of publicity and ego.

How did the deal come about?

“These people [BLK Prime] came out of the woodwork,” Frank Warren (Avanesyan’s promoter) told this writer. “I have no idea who they are. They contacted us through the fighter. George [Warren’s son and CEO of Queensberry Promotions] and [Queensberry event manager] Andy Ayling put the deal together. And I can assure you; there’s no way in the world that David would be going to the United States unless his money was safeguarded.”

“It is what it is,” Crawford said after the deal was announced. “I’m moving forward with my career. I agreed to everything that I needed to agree to get that fight [Crawford-Spence] made. But there’s only so much I can do. Al told me, ‘Well, you take this fight or you got nothing.’ I don’t know like the type of caliber of people that he been dealing with. Like, what do you really expect? You expect me to be disrespected, ran over, stepped on, and just sit there and just take it. We’re gonna turn up with BLK Prime. We gonna do our thing. They turnin’ boxing around, man. All the biggest fights going through them. They the new wave. You wanna fight this guy, you wanna fight this guy. They gonna make it happen.”

Okay . . . So what is BLK Prime? As noted above, it’s a video-on-demand service. As of this writing, it charges $3.99 per month for content exclusive of pay-per-view events. It’s hard to think of a promotional company about which so little is known that appeared on the boxing scene in conjunction with a fight of similar magnitude.

The driving force behind BLK Prime appears to be Desmond Gumbs, who has been on the fringe of the entertainment business for years and is alleged in various internet postings to have left a trail of unpaid creditors in his wake.

Gumbs is also listed as the athletic director and head football coach at Lincoln University – a private school in Oakland. According to Wikipedia, Lincoln is on the U.S. Department of Education’s Federal Student Aid (FSA) List of Institutions on Heightened Cash Monitoring.

“Heightened Cash Monitoring,” Wikipedia explains, “is a step that FSA can take with institutions to provide additional oversight for a number of financial or federal compliance issues, some of which may be serious and others that may be less troublesome. The list notes ‘severe findings’ for Lincoln University.”

In addition, a November 1, 2018, report from an online publication called Record Searchlight ties Gumbs to a motel called Market Street Manor which the Shasta County (California) District Attorney’s office said was purchased in April 2017 by Desmond and Chandler Gumbs through a company called Earl Freddy Invest C LLC.

In a news release, District Attorney Stephanie Bridgett declared, “The Market Street Manor has become a hub of crime and violence in our community and it is a public nuisance. I cannot permit this business to continue violating the law without consequences.” The news release also referenced “deplorable living conditions” in the motel including the allegation that some rooms were “infested with rats, mice and bedbugs” and Bridgett’s claim that “the Gumbses’ ownership is putting a strain on law enforcement and affecting neighboring businesses.”

A company in the United Kingdom called BLK Prime Limited is registered as a property management business and lists Desmond Gumbs as a director. BLK Prime G LLC is listed by Bizapedia as a California limited-liability entertainment company whose filing status has been “suspended” by the Franchise Tax Board for failure to meet state tax requirements.

These are not good credentials.

Crawford, as noted above, said that his purse for fighting Avanesyan would be $10 million. That was far above market value and considerably more than Terence received for recent fights against Jose Benavidez Jr ($3.5 million), Amir Khan ($4.8 million), Egidijus Kavaliauskas ($4 million), Kell Brook ($3.5 million), and Shawn Porter ($6 million).

“I already got half of my money,” Crawford told Brian Custer several weeks before the bout. “And I’mma get the other half before I even step in the ring, like a week before or so. That way, I don’t have to worry about if they have the money or they don’t or have to go through all those hoops on getting paid. My money is already secured.”

Avanesyan’s purse was $550,000 with no option clause should he win. The contract also called for him to receive partial payment had the fight fallen through due to no fault on his part. Avanesyan’s purse was held in escrow by attorney Leon Margules. The final payment to the escrow fund was due on December 5 and was received by Margules on December 9.

Expenses for the promotion, if Crawford had in fact contracted for $10 million, were expected to total close to $12 million. Where would the revenue to cover these costs (or even a $5 million purse for Crawford) come from?

Tickets for the event were priced from $500 down to $50. In a best-case scenario, the promotion could hope for a live gate of $1 million to $2 million. The other substantial revenue stream would come from pay-per-view buys. But Crawford has never been a pay-per-view draw. “His marketability,” Bob Arum has observed, “didn’t measure up to his ability. Terence’s numbers on PPV have always been dreadful.”

Crawford vs. Shawn Porter generated a dismal 135,000 pay-per-view buys. And that was with two talented “name fighters” competing against one another and ESPN’s marketing muscle behind the promotion. BLK Prime had no marketing platform to build on.

By way of comparison, ESPN’s main Instagram page has 24.2 million followers. BLK Prime’s main Instagram page is credited with 47,000.

Moreover, Crawford-Avanesyan would be airing opposite the Heisman Trophy presentation followed by a Top Rank card featuring Teofimo Lopez on ESPN. Best estimates were that Crawford-Avanesyan would generate well under 50,000 buys.

On November 28, 2022, BLK announced that Crawford-Avanesyan would be distributed on pay-per-view through traditional cable and satellite outlets by Integrated Sports and streamed by BLK Prime and PPV.com for $39.95. Protocol Sports Marketing was chosen to market and distribute worldwide media rights (excluding the United States and Canada).

In an effort to bolster the promotion, 37-year-old Cris Cyborg was added to the card in a four-round lightweight boxing match against Gabrielle Holloway (another MMA fighter who engaged in two boxing matches six years ago and lost both of them).

Todd Grisham was brought onboard to handle the blow-by-blow commentary with Paulie Malignaggi and Antonio Tarver beside him.

On the afternoon of the fight, it was announced that Adrian Broner will face off against Ivan Redkach on BLK Prime in Atlanta on February 18, 2023, with Tevin Farmer vs. Mickey Bey on the undercard. This assumes that Broner isn’t in jail, can make weight (a dubious proposition), and shows up for the fight.

BLK Prime doesn’t have options on Crawford. The widespread assumption is that it lost millions of dollars on Crawford-Avanesyan and would lose millions more on a Broner venture.

And for what? Crawford-Avansyan did next to nothing in terms of getting the BLK Prime app off the ground. Nor did it establish the company as a significant player in boxing. What is the long-term business plan?

CHI Health Center seats 17,000 for boxing. The announced crowd for Crawford-Avanesyan was 14,630. The undercard was undistinguished. The television production suffered from a lack of multiple camera angles. Crawford (a 12-to-1 betting favorite) knocked Avanesyan unconscious with a highlight-reel left-uppercut-right-hook combination in the sixth round.

And a thought in closing . . .

Four decades ago, a man named Ross Fields (who adopted the alias “Harold Smith”) formed a company called Muhammad Ali Professional Sports and, with Ali’s consent, began promoting fights. Smith paid outlandish purses to fighters and MAPS hemorrhaged money until it was revealed that the source of his funding was $21 million ($73 million in today’s dollars) that had been embezzled from the Wells Fargo Bank of California.

BLK Prime’s boxing venture might be on the up-and-up. But it’s worth remembering what Bob Arum said about Harold Smith’s promotional activities way back when.

“I am totally bewildered,” Arum stated, “why anybody would go into boxing ventures for the purpose of losing substantial sums of money. They are paying double and triple what other promoters could afford to pay and remain solvent. How they do it and why is a mystery. Where does the money come from?”

Thomas Hauser’s email address is thomashauserwriter@gmail.com. His most recent book – In the Inner Sanctum: Behind the Scenes at Big Fights – was published by the University of Arkansas Press. In 2004, the Boxing Writers Association of America honored Hauser with the Nat Fleischer Award for career excellence in boxing journalism. In 2019, he was selected for boxing’s highest honor – induction into the International Boxing Hall of Fame.

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