COMING SOON TO A : Theater Near You

By STEVE SPRINGER

May 24, 1996 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

So you think you’ve got this all figured out. Julio Cesar Chavez is facing Oscar De La Hoya on June 7 at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas in what is being called the fight of the decade. You’ll flip on your illegal black box to steal the cable signal and watch for free.

Well, you can forget that idea.

For the record:

12:00 a.m. May 25, 1996 For the Record
Los Angeles Times Saturday May 25, 1996 Home Edition Sports Part C Page 7 Sports Desk 2 inches; 41 words Type of Material: Correction
Boxing--The closed-circuit telecast of the June 7 Oscar De La Hoya-Julio Cesar Chavez fight will not be available to the public at Commerce Casino, as was listed in The Times on Friday. It is a private showing at that location. The fight will also be shown at the Sports Arena, which was not listed.

OK, you’ll wheel your big-screen television into the garage, pay the cable company its $39.95 fee, squeeze everybody you know into the room at $10 a head and reap a nice little profit.

Forget that idea.

Well then, perhaps you’ll spend a quiet evening at home on the couch, have a few beers, enjoy the fight with the family, tape it and then watch the replay with the guys on the weekend.

And even forget that idea.

For the first time in more than a decade, a monumental fight will not be available on home television except for a few isolated areas.

Tired of losing customers to piracy, exasperated by 40 or 50 people watching a fight for the cost of one subscription and motivated by a bout that has captivated legions of fans on both sides of the border, promoter Bob Arum has put his fight back into the theaters, where it will be available, as in days of old, on a closed-circuit basis only.

Arum had long felt piracy and other forms of cheating had blurred the once-bright picture offered by pay-per-view. But for him, the most telling blow came last December when Gabriel Ruelas and Azumah Nelson fought for the World Boxing Council super-featherweight title. It should have been an attractive fight, especially in Southern California. After all, it matched Ruelas, an L.A. resident in his first fight since the fatal bout against Jimmy Garcia the previous spring, against Nelson, a former two-time champion who went on to win his third title that night. But the fight was purchased by only 60,000 subscribers.

“I attribute the tremendous falloff solely to the proliferation of black boxes,” Arum said. “There have been estimates that for every home that buys a fight, two homes steal it.”

Arum insists that the cable companies need not be helpless victims of this scam.

“Pay-per-view is flawed,” he said. “What they could do is fire a bullet to get people’s attention. They could interrupt service. They could tell their viewers, ‘OK, we are going to shut down for one day, test everything and knock out every illegal box.’ They can determine in their system how many illegal boxes there are. They could reprogram, using a different chip. There are a lot of ways to handle it. But that costs money, which they are not willing to spend.

“The cable companies are all fat and lazy. Once they find an illegal signal and take action, they will lose a subscriber, which means they will lose their cable fee, their bread and butter.”

Mark Taffet, an executive with Time Warner Sports, doesn’t agree.

“Nothing is that simple,” he said. “We recognize that the problem needs to be addressed. However, there is no magic wand that can be waved to solve the problem. Bob has raised everyone’s awareness and I believe the cable industry will take positive steps in the future.”

It is difficult to police the use of black boxes, since they can be openly advertised and sold but not used to steal signals. It’s sort of like running the odds on games, then reminding people that the information is not for gambling purposes.

“The cable companies retrieve as many as 100,000 [black boxes] a year that are being used illegally,” Taffet said. “When Bob says we could shut down for a day, again, it’s not that simple. There are many different systems.”

The next generation of telecommunications will make these black boxes obsolete, but you can bet that the next generation of pirates will soon be at work on a way to steal the new technology.

Another reason Arum likes going the closed-circuit route, he said, is because it gets the exhibitors involved in promotion and advertising. He says the bulk of that burden falls on the promoter in a pay-per-view operation.

“We still believe that pay-per-view is the single most lucrative way to market a major event,” Taffet said. “With any fight, pay-per-view is the way to maximize profits.”

Public response to the Chavez-De La Hoya fight has been impressive. Of a potential 950,000 seats available in 20 Western states, 250,000 have already been sold. There are 124,000 seats in Southern California at 31 locations from Santa Barbara to San Diego, and more than 70,000 have been sold at prices ranging from $30 to $100. Across the country, with a potential 1 1/2 million to 2 million seats available, the story is the same. In Illinois, 20,000 of 80,000 seats are already sold; in Texas, 125,000 of 500,000 are gone; in Florida, 100,000 of 800,000 tickets have been gobbled up.

The largest local location is the Pond of Anaheim, with 16,000 seats. It is sold out.

The average price for a seat locally is $35, but, at the Oxnard Performing Arts Center, tickets are going for $100 with a dinner included.

There will also be private showings for those wealthy enough to afford it, everywhere from the Playboy Mansion to the Friars Club.

There are about 2 million seats available in Mexico at an average price of $10. Although no figures are yet available, those running the promotion say they are doing a brisk business south of the border.

What makes all these figures impressive is that, historically, closed-circuit operations have sold as much as 90% of their tickets in the final three days before an event, and this fight is still more than two weeks away.

Arum calls the return to closed circuit going “back to the future.”

Indeed, the idea of fights in theaters is not new. As a matter of fact, it goes back more than a century. Of course, in the late 1800s, there were no screens. Only live bodies.

John L. Sullivan, generally regarded as the first great heavyweight champion, barnstormed the country, appearing in theaters where he would offer $50 to any challenger who could last a round with him.

None could.

Fast-forward 60 years. In the 1940s, the mass appeal of such fighters as Rocky Marciano and Sugar Ray Robinson and the advent of technology inspired a return to the theaters. Fans across the country could sit in the same seats in which they watched their favorite movie stars and watch their favorite fighters.

Fast-forward 40 more years. Another giant leap in technology made it possible to target a video signal to specific homes. It was the age when pay-per-view became the driving force in boxing, an age of big bucks for promoters, managers and fighters.

It was thought to be the dawn of a new era in sports, an era that some embraced and some feared. But all were in awe of the possibilities. If major title fights were for sale on a home-by-home basis, wouldn’t the Super Bowl and the World Series be close behind? Many predicted free telecasts of sports events might soon go the way of silent movies.

Pay-per-view fights flourished in the 1980s, in large part because Sugar Ray Leonard, Roberto Duran, Thomas Hearns and Marvin Hagler were all in their prime.

In 1991, when George Foreman fought Evander Holyfield for the heavyweight title, a record 1.45 million homes bought the fight at an average of $40 per home, bringing in $58 million.

Arum said he expects Chavez-De La Hoya to fill 2 million seats in the United States at an average of $32 a seat to bring in $64 million, and an additional 1.5 million seats in Mexico at about $10 a seat, generating $15 million more for a total of $79 million, far exceeding the best pay-per-view has done. Chavez will make $9 million, De La Hoya $8.9 million.

Last year 1.4 million homes bought the first ring appearance of Mike Tyson after three years of imprisonment for rape. Never mind that Tyson was facing a journeyman named Peter McNeeley, who didn’t even belong in the same ring with the former undisputed heavyweight champ. Fans shelled out an average of $45 per home to watch a bout that lasted 89 seconds, bringing in $63 million.

“Tyson’s return actually hurt pay-per-view as much as it helped,” said Mike Malitz, an official of the Top Rank boxing organization headed by Arum. “The high price gave fans more incentive to steal the signal. They figured they would get a black box, and the Tyson fight and a few other fights would more than justify paying for it.”

Nobody, not even Arum, is saying that closed circuit is about to supplant pay-per-view as the boxing medium of the future. It will take an event of this magnitude to generate business of this magnitude.

“Closed circuit is part of the landscape again,” said Rick Kulis, the president of Event Entertainment in Rolling Hills Estates and the man in charge of the Chavez-De La Hoya closed-circuit operation for the western half of this country.

“What we are doing doesn’t signal anything for the future. It doesn’t mean cable couldn’t come back. If people were properly compensated, they could turn the tide again.

“But the cable industry does not have a birthright to this product.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

The Venues

Southern California venues for Julio Cesar Chavez-Oscar De La Hoya fight, Friday, June 7.

* Anaheim Pond

* Anaheim Convention Center

* Performing Arts Center, Oxnard

* Long Beach Convention Center

* Arlington Theater, Santa Barbara

* Grand Olympic

* Universal Amphitheater

* Paramount Ballroom