HBO Waiting to Show Replay : Boxing: Cable network is putting together a two-hour special, but it probably won’t be shown before Friday.

HBO will replay the Buster Douglas-Mike Tyson fight, but not until the end of the week.

The playdate will be announced today.

“It probably won’t be before Friday,” Seth Abraham, HBO senior vice president in charge of sports, said Sunday from his home in New York.

“If there had been no controversy, we would probably show the fight (today) or Tuesday. But now we want to put on a different type of show than just the fight. We’ll approach it with a eye toward history, not just an eye toward ratings.

“Since we are a pay network, we don’t have advertisers telling us to play it right away and get the ratings.”

Abraham said HBO wants to line up interviews with both fighters, with the referee, and possibly others. A two-hour special is being planned.

“There’s a lot of logistical work to be done,” Abraham said.

Unless promoter Don King’s appeal is upheld, the loss for Tyson means his $26.5-million, eight-fight contract with HBO is off.

With two fights remaining on the contract, Tyson will get about $20 million from HBO, Abraham said.

Abraham said he went to the HBO studios Sunday to take a close look at the long count in the eighth round.

“I had an engineer slow it down,” Abraham said, “and I looked at it over and over. No question it was a long count, but no question Buster Douglas could have gotten up at any time. He simply took the four extra seconds the referee gave him.”

On NBC Sunday, sportscaster Bob Costas also put a clock on the 10th-round knockout of Tyson. It too had a long count.

Highlights from the fight can’t be shown by news outlets for one year because HBO owns the delay rights.

But Sunday, NBC and CNN did show the long count in the eighth round. They got it from a news conference held by King Sunday in which he used footage from Japanese television to make his point. CNN and NBC simply had a cameraman shoot off the video.

“We can’t put an iron curtain over the world,” Abraham said.

“ESPN and other networks have inquired about a deal for permission to show highlights. We said no thank you.”

HBO commentator Larry Merchant, after returning home to Santa Monica Sunday, said he was simply doing his job when he pressed Douglas for postfight comments despite the fighter’s emotional state.

“My job was to let him compose himself and for him--not me--to decide if he wanted to go on,” Merchant said. “Knowing him from the past and knowing him to be a bright fellow, I felt he would come around, and he did.”