Teddy Atlas: If PBC builds boxing right, they will come; if not, they will leave

TAMPA - Boxing analyst Teddy Atlas has spent most of his adult life in and around boxing, and pulls no punches when he talks about the sport he loves.

On the eve of ESPN's debut with the Premier Boxing Champions, Atlas believes Al Haymon's upstart PBC could be a boon for boxing.

Or it could be a bust, if it's not done right.

"It's good because it's making boxing feel more relevant. And that's the answer in a nutshell," Atlas, who will call Saturday's fights from the USF Sundome with ESPN blow-by-blow announcer Joe Tessitore, told Paste BN Sports. "The more it's available, the more chance for growth for the fan base."

And since its debut on NBC in March, it's available on nearly every over-the-air and cable network that matters - ABC, NBC, CBS, ESPN, Spike. And of course, premium networks HBO and Showtime still play a huge part in bringing the sport to the masses.

Ratings have been quite good - the PBC on NBC has averaged more than 3 million viewers for two cards so far - and the fights, for the most part, have been fan-friendly and exciting. Keith Thurman, who will fight Saturday night (ESPN, 9 p.m. ET), kicked off the original show on NBC in March with a one-sided, but action-packed victory against Robert Guerrero.

Yet, Atlas cautions that there is another side to the story of bringing boxing back anywhere close to the standing it once enjoyed as one of America's most popular pastimes.

"It reminds me of that silly Kevin Costner movie that was fun to watch, Field of Dreams. If you build it, they will come," Atlas said. "(Haymon) kind of built it, and the people came. I just don't know if they're going to stay. You have to continue to put on competitive fights. He has around 200 guys signed up. A lot of them are good fighters. But they're not all at the same level. Some are more of the opponent level. If you continue to put the good ones in with the good ones, the people will watch it. I just don't know when you're going to run out of that, though."

If you put good ones in with not-so-good ones, Atlas warns, some of the luster will wear off.

"If you don't stay true to that formula of the top guys fighting the top guys," said Atlas, who has trained such heavyweights as Mike Tyson and Alexander Povetkin during his long career, "I think the people will leave."

That's the sequel to the Kevin Costner movie, he said. "I just hope we don't get the sequel because we only saw the first one, 'If you build it, they will come.' We don't want to see the one where "If you don't build it right, they will leave." I don't want to see that sequel. I don't want Al Haymon to see that sequel because we're partners with Al now. I hope we can give the people reason to stay. Because Haymon has gotten the people's attention back to a sport that had been gone for a long time."

The PBC's Saturday matchup pits hard-hitting, undefeated WBA welterweight champion "One Time" Thurman, fighting in his hometown, against Luis Collazo. Many believe that Collazo, a 34-year-old former champion, does not belong in the same ring as Thurman. But Collazo, a tough Brooklyn boxer, always comes to fight, and that, combined with Thurman's power and ring skills, should make for a watchable matchup, for however long it lasts. The first fight of the telecast, junior middleweights Willie Nelson and undefeated knockout artist Tony Harrison, could steal the show.

Boxing, Atlas argues, should be in the national conversation because he considers it a special sport.

"For me, the specialness in this sport is that no matter what you come from, your ethnicity, your religion, your race," Atlas said, "whatever your background is, who your parents are, what part of the country you grew up in, no matter how much you've suffered, whatever, if you have it in your heart, in your spirit, in your body, to prepare yourself hard enough and drive yourself long enough, on one given night you can get in that ring and make the world fair. And that's pretty damn good. . . . On that given night, if it means enough for you, and you've prepared yourself enough for it, you can get in there, and you can get your hand risen, and be called the best in the world. I think there's a powerful power to that."

Atlas said the multi-million-dollar lawsuits filed recently against Haymon and the PBC by Bob Arum's Top Rank Promotions and Oscar De La Hoya's Golden Boy Promotions, charging that the PBC is trying to take over the sport and put other promoters out of business, are a product of boxing's business model.

"You don't see this in other sports, where everybody has to play with each other for the benefit of the sport. Because at the end of the day, it's going to hurt them if they don't because they all have the same objective. If the sport's strong, their franchise is going to make money," Atlas said.

"That is a common denominator you don't have in boxing. Because you have power brokers and everybody's fighting for a piece of the land. It's sort of the Wild West. I hate to say it because I've been in this business my whole life. But it is. There's no sheriff. The other sports have a national body, a strong, solid place for the rules to be laid out, because at the end of the day, it's about the sport.

"It's not about that in boxing. Whether it's Arum or De La Hoya or Haymon, everyone is their own separate power broker. They just want their little piece of land, and then make it into a bigger piece of land, but they're not thinking about anything as far as the sport. They're going to make money as long as they have the power and their piece of land. It's not about a community, and there's nobody there to tell you that it is. There's nobody there to direct you. There's nobody in the schoolyard that's blowing a whistle and saying 'Now, now, fellas, come on.' There's nobody in charge.

"They're separate power brokers, and this is America, and you can still go out there and do pretty damn well."

Atlas said he sometimes thinks about how boxing cannibalizes itself to the point where, what's going to happen when it eats enough of itself to where there won't by anything left? But it never seems to happen.

"I do sometimes think, 'When will the sport erode itself with all the infighting and the greed; these guys have the ability to control the judges, they have the ability to control the sanctioning bodies, and in baseball you have a guy like Pete Rose, who isn't allowed back into the sport because it hurts the credibility of the sport. And I look at boxing and I say, 'You know what, there is no failsafe to protect the sport, there is no mechanism to make sure the integrity of the sport has been kept.' And when you see those times when the integrity of the sport is so badly damaged and so badly attacked, you think the sport is going to suffer to the point where it can't regroup.

"But then what I said earlier might be the key: People will always be willing to watch two men get in that ring, if you put the right men in the ring, to find out who the best is."