Behind the Scenes, Haymon Is Shaking Up the Fight Game
As Floyd Mayweather Jr. basked in his latest victory, the man behind the curtain actually stood behind a curtain, a cliché sprung to life. Few in the postfight news conference recognized this man, a reclusive, eccentric so-called adviser who rarely ventures into public.
The man arrived in Las Vegas incognito, dressed like a secret agent: black suit, white shirt, dark tie. His influence extended over every aspect of the promotion, from Mayweather’s $40 million pay structure to the resale of the best tickets at the MGM’s Grand Garden Arena.
As the chief architect of the career of Mayweather, perhaps the most prominent fighter since Mike Tyson, this man ranks among boxing’s most powerful figures. He also stands between Mayweather and a blockbuster fight with Manny Pacquiao.
From behind the curtain, he watched as Mayweather called his sizable entourage onstage, thanking bodyguards, assistants and assistants to assistants. “Where’s Al Haymon?” Mayweather said as he scanned the audience, his question a familiar one.
Mayweather shrugged. “Al Haymon would never come up here,” he added. “Al Haymon is the Ghost.”
These are the Haymon basics: Harvard-educated; successful in live concert promotion, then television production, now boxing; extensive list of celebrity clients; a brother, Bobby, who once fought Sugar Ray Leonard; no office, no answering machine, no photographs, no interviews.
“Think of Al as the Wizard of Oz,” said Phil Casey, one longtime partner in the music business. “It’s best not to try and figure him out.”
From Concert Stage to TV Screen
Haymon, 56, grew up in Cleveland and studied economics at Harvard, where he also earned a master’s degree in business administration. He started promoting recording artists while still in school, and even financed his first show, which featured the violinist Jean-Luc Ponty, with student loans.
After college, Haymon returned to Cleveland and established a relationship with the O’Jays, growing especially close with Eddie Levert, the lead vocalist, and his son Gerald, an R&B singer. Haymon, Eddie Levert said, became “almost like blood to us.”
Levert described Haymon as a momma’s boy, and he meant it as a compliment. Early on, Haymon’s mother, Emma Lou, helped him with promotions, and for her 70th birthday, they recreated their trip to Harvard for his freshman year.
Haymon eventually created 14 businesses, mostly to deal with myriad aspects of live concert promotion. Early on, he was partners with Casey, then head of urban contemporary music at International Creative Management.
Casey estimated they staged more than 1,000 concerts together. Their client roster included M. C. Hammer, New Edition, Whitney Houston and Mary J. Blige. They were, Casey said, among the first urban concert promoters to package several acts into a single tour, some of which ran for 300 days. They created the Budweiser Superfest, a concert series that ran from 1979 to 1999 and was revived in 2010.
Haymon and Casey turned an often haphazard business into an assembly-line production. They oversaw lighting, production, marketing and advertising, built an infrastructure, a total package, then plugged artists in. In 1992, Haymon, in a rare interview, told USA Today that they put on some 500 shows and grossed $60 million the year before.
“You could say the African-American concert world was divided in two camps: all the promoters who were trying to beat Al, and him,” said Jack Boyle, then chairman of the concert giant SFX Entertainment’s live music group.
By 1987, Haymon began to branch out. He co-promoted the “Eddie Murphy Raw” tour, working closely with Murphy and his stepfather, Vernon Lynch. Lynch’s partner, Gregory Pai, said the tour was at that time the highest-grossing comedy tour and comedy film ever.
“Promotion is as much science as art, and Al was able to mix the two,” Pai said. “He understood the mechanics of the business. He was an optimizer, the Steve Jobs of promotion.”
Haymon glided easily among constituents, as comfortable with lawyers in a boardroom as with artists from the streets. He knew politics, literature and economics, but he also knew how to avoid controversy. He sent holiday gift baskets and doled out concert tickets.
As his concert business evolved, Haymon’s reputation grew to include his propensity for putting on only the biggest, boldest shows, with back-to-back engagements up to 1,200 miles apart.
“If there’s a tour now with long routes, still, people say, is that an Al Haymon tour?” said Carl Freed, once executive director of the North American Independent Concert Promoters Association, which Haymon never joined.
In 1999, Haymon sold A. H. Enterprises to SFX Entertainment. The move, at the time, was typical, but the split was not. Haymon retained 50 percent and most of the creative control.
As R&B concert promotion gradually gave way to hip-hop and rap tours, Casey said, he and Haymon cut back. The problems with such tours — fights backstage, shootings, bloated entourages — were overdramatized, Casey added, “But when they did happen, it was so disruptive.” Casey recalled one incident, at a show in Boston, that resulted in a lawsuit and forced the cancellation of future events. They lost their building deposits and wasted their advertising money.
Haymon shifted into television production, where he encountered a skeptical Bob Levinson, the former head of the television department at I.C.M. Expecting someone in his 50s, Levinson was surprised by Haymon, still in his 30s.
“I know you don’t like this,” Levinson said Haymon told him. “But tell me what to do, and I’ll do it.”
Haymon, Levinson said, structured his initial deal so that he received little money up front, a tactic he later used in boxing. Haymon was expected to deliver perhaps one or two shows, but by the end of the first year, he had 13 projects under way. And in this writer-driven medium, he wrote none of them himself.
He is credited as a producer on 10 television shows, including, most recently, “Grown Ups” on UPN from 1999 to 2000. From there, he segued into boxing but kept his hand in music. These varied businesses, though, held much in common, like treating talent as commodities, and working months on a single event.
Kery Davis, HBO’s senior vice president for sports programming, who also has a background in the music business, pointed to another crucial similarity among the industries Haymon penetrated.
“Very few barriers to entry,” he said.
Entering a New Arena
Haymon stepped gingerly into boxing, around 2000; it is unclear exactly when. He first worked closely with one fighter, Vernon Forrest, and described his foray into pugilism as a hobby, nothing more.
Friends like Levert were concerned that Haymon “was probably in over his head.” But Haymon’s only unease lay with his mother. Haymon told Levinson she did not approve of boxing. During fights, he sent siblings to her house to keep her occupied, so she would not accidentally see him on TV.
Haymon’s small inner circle entered the boxing world with him. Sylvia Browne, his assistant, handled much of the day-to-day affairs. Sam Watson and his two sons represented the public face of Haymon’s boxing enterprise, accompanying Haymon fighters into the ring.
Early on, Haymon tenaciously sought connections with the networks. He called Xavier James, the vice president for sports programming at HBO until 2004, at all hours daily, on three separate lines, and yet Haymon remained a mystery to James. Haymon penetrated boxing, James said, “with a great deal of guile and almost no personal interaction.”
“If I wanted to,” James said Haymon often told him, “I could run boxing.”
Starting with Forrest, Haymon established his reputation as someone who maximized fighters’ incomes, often at the expense of promoters. But his handling of fighters was not universally lauded.
Consider Lamon Brewster. Starting in 1999, he was bankrolled by Sam Simon, a boxing fan and a co-creator of “The Simpsons.” Simon said he paid Brewster about $50,000 annually on top of his fight purses and allowed Brewster to live rent-free in a house he owned.
Their relationship went beyond money, Simon said. So when Brewster defeated Wladimir Klitschko to capture the World Boxing Organization’s heavyweight title in April 2004, Simon pronounced it “the happiest night of my life,” like “having one horse and winning the Kentucky Derby.”
Soon after, Brewster talked about adding Haymon to the team as an adviser. He also began working with Don King. Simon said Haymon did not return his phone calls. At his next fight, five months later in Las Vegas, Brewster called Haymon and handed the phone to Simon. Haymon told Simon, “You’re out of a job.” A contract was then slid under the door of Simon’s hotel room. His commission had been reduced to 1 percent.
“It was like a bad boxing movie,” Simon said. “I blamed Haymon. I considered it the greatest betrayal of my life.”
Brewster responded to initial inquiries but ultimately was not available to comment. Through his lawyer, Haymon declined to answer questions.
Despite multiple eye operations and retinal tears, Brewster continued to fight, including four times in Germany, where the sport is regulated less stringently. Yet for one bout, in 2006 in Cleveland, Brewster submitted medical records in which the answers to three questions under Eye History, including blurred vision and surgical procedures, were “No.”
The records were faxed to the Ohio Athletic Commission from A. Haymon Development.
When Brewster went to a party at Simon’s house last December, few recognized him. To Simon, Brewster’s left eye appeared vacant. Simon and others who know him worry that Brewster is going blind.
Promoter, Manager or Both?
Most major professional sports leagues vet athletes’ representatives. In boxing, however, anyone can call himself an adviser, and lines are crossed often, without consequence. A fighter’s representative once phoned Xavier James, the former HBO executive, from a correctional facility.
Haymon is licensed in Nevada as a manager, yet he also performs many of same functions as promoters, his associates said, putting him in a legal gray area and perhaps in violation of the Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act, passed in 2000.
Pat English, a prominent boxing lawyer who helped draft the legislation, said it was intended to clearly separate promoters and managers.
Promoters assume the financial risk for an event, select the site, rent the ring and pay insurance. The less they pay any one fighter, the more they make. The manager is beholden to an individual boxer, not the card. In practice, the two should act as a counterbalance.
Haymon, though, appears to operate as a hybrid, said James, Bob Arum of Top Rank Boxing, and seven others with direct knowledge of Haymon’s business dealings who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution in future negotiations.
“I don’t think it’s a gray area; some do,” James said. “If you’re acting like a promoter, you should be subject to regulations. You can’t say, ‘O.K., I’m benefiting fighters, so therefore I don’t have to be in compliance.’ ”
Others see such criticism as mere jealousy toward Haymon.
“He makes fighters the most money,” said Jeff Wald, who helped create the reality TV series “The Contender” and worked with Haymon in boxing and entertainment. “Of course everybody hates him. If I was a fighter, he’s the first guy I’d go to.”
Showtime declined to comment about its dealings with Haymon.
Davis said HBO did not negotiate directly with Haymon. He said that “it would be inaccurate to say we never talk to Al,” but that the network makes boxing deals with promoters only.
Much of Haymon’s influence is derived from his relationship with Mayweather. Haymon helped him maneuver out of his contract with Top Rank for $750,000. Mayweather became the biggest pay-per-view draw of his generation, made a professional wrestling cameo, appeared on “Dancing With the Stars,” all in part because of Haymon’s influence. Boxing fans are craving a showdown between Mayweather and Pacquiao. The fate of that fight may rest with Haymon more than with any other person.
Richard Schaefer, the chief executive of Golden Boy Promoters, the company hired in recent years to promote Mayweather fights, called Haymon “easily the smartest man I’ve ever met.”
Mayweather added, “If I would have had Al Haymon from the beginning, I probably would be a billionaire right now.”
Haymon’s power extends beyond Mayweather, though. He represents other prominent boxers, including Andre Berto, Paul Williams and Jermain Taylor, along with younger prospects like Adrien Broner and Gary Russell Jr. Haymon spreads those fighters among various promoters and steers clear of long-term contracts.
Berto is most often cited example of Haymon’s reach. In January 2010, he was supposed to fight Shane Mosley but withdrew, citing the earthquake in his native Haiti. Mosley ended up fighting Mayweather, while Berto received a $1.5 million fee to fight Carlos Quintana in a mostly empty arena in Florida. Berto knocked him out.
This series of events profited Berto, Mosley, Mayweather and Haymon, none of whom complained, all of whom could say that Haymon did his job and then some. But fans and some of the sport’s officials say boxing suffers from such lopsided matchups — the most common complaint against Haymon.
“Al Haymon is an enterprising young man,” King said. “He goes in with the cheaper price, without the responsibility. He’s not a bad guy. He seized an opportunity. He grasped the time. He chose fighters where he can pay less, not get more. But don’t blame Al Haymon for bad fights. Blame the enablers around him.”
Silence Is Golden
Late last month, Haymon traveled to Cincinnati, where Broner decimated an overmatched opponent in three rounds to capture the W.B.O.’s vacant junior-lightweight belt. On the same card, Russell needed but one round to score a knockout. Two fights, four rounds.
Haymon was front and center on the HBO telecast. To some, this appeared strategic.
On one side of him sat Berto, whose rematch against Victor Ortiz will take place on Showtime, not HBO, early next year. On the other side of Haymon sat Mayweather, his diamond watch sparkling under the lights. This scene — two easy victories over marginal opponents for his fighters; Haymon flanked by two prominent boxers he could shop to Showtime or to HBO —demonstrated his influence.
On that night, as on most nights, Haymon said nothing and somehow also said everything he needed to.
