Drawing Top Athletes Into the Fight Game Michael King, 64, knows something about heavyweights - television heavyweights. He spent most of his career in charge of King World Productions, which distributed "Wheel of Fortune," "Jeopardy!" and "The Oprah Winfrey Show." King, a longtime boxing fan, long dabbled in sports. He once owned part of the Yankees, the Devils and the Nets. In recent years, he moved full time into boxing, in search of the next American heavyweight champion. He founded All-American Heavyweights, built a state-of-the-art training center in Southern California and poured some $25 million into the program, which has produced Dominic Breazeale, the first American super heavyweight to qualify for the Olympics since 2004. Breazeale is an embodiment of the program King envisioned: a former quarterback at Northern Colorado turned pugilist, the kind of athlete boxing has long lost to other sports. How did you end up here? When I was growing up, the heavyweight champion was the biggest star in the world. I had the pleasure of watching Cassius Clay, later Muhammad Ali, start his professional career. He was the most exciting fighter out there. There were a lot of great fighters, though. There were a lot of exciting, really great athletes competing in the same weight class, at heavyweight. Those fights were some of the greatest sporting competitions around, bar none. At one point - people forget this - a heavyweight fight was bigger than the Super Bowl. Does that seem like another lifetime? Athletes stopped coming out for boxing. It's no secret. They started going into other sports. It's pretty hard to develop a program if the athletes aren't there. We feel the Olympic program is the most exciting platform, where every true superstar in the pros came from, and we believe boxing can be brought back by the tremendous athletes who are out there, who are bigger, faster and stronger than they've ever been. Put that together with my background. That's the model. What was the initial reaction to your plan in the boxing community? Obviously, we had a lot of naysayers, a lot of people who thought it was pretty crazy. But we took a gentleman who was a phenomenal football player and turned him into a heavyweight champion. He went on to become one of the best superheavyweights in the world. And he didn't put gloves on until three years ago. On top of that, why would I make that kind of investment? Look at the television networks. Their most important programming element is sports. There's a really amazing business opportunity there as well. When you look at what is wrong with boxing, where do you start? There hasn't been any investment in anything in the sport. There's no apprenticeship of trainers. No apprenticeship of cut men. We're going to look for the next generation: new judges, new officiating, a new way to produce the television program. Boxing looks the same as it has for 50 years. For us, the health of the athlete will come first. We're constantly monitoring with a physical therapist. We deal with a concussion institute. Sports psychologist. All that stuff. Is the idea is to get Division I athletes who did not make the jump to the N.F.L. or the N.B.A.? We're doing it in steps. We're putting a new face on this sport. So if we have to rebuild it from the ground up, why shouldn't we get the best athletes? Division I athletes. Absolutely phenomenal athletes. Look, Olympic boxing had its worst performance in history in 2008. We went from our absolute best in 1984 to our absolute worst in 2008. It's pretty simple when you start digging in to see the problems. It starts on the development end. How did your friends in television react to this boxing venture? We haven't talked to a lot of people. This has been kind of under wraps. I've been doing this for a little over four years. It didn't make sense to me to tell people what we were doing. We made a lot of mistakes. It's not easy to teach a kid who never had a glove on. Guys, no matter how strong and tough they are, get to sparring and immediately leave. They don't want to get hit. Others can't defend themselves. How does your television experience play into this? We want to do the same thing we did at King World. We're going with the most exciting weight division. It's also the one with the least amount of competition. That's our best opportunity. We've worked with football players and basketball players, a sprinter, a water polo player, elite athletes in all sports. When we started getting publicity, guys from all different weight classes contacted us; guys who never boxed wanted to join. When you start putting this on TV, it lends itself to a very exciting reality show. This is exciting programming. This is right now a sport that people still love. Floyd Mayweather has generated something like $120, $130 million in pay-per-view revenue in his last two fights, and he personally picked up like $50 million for himself. That's pretty wild. He made more than any superstar in basketball, and he did it in an hour. It takes Kobe a whole season to make $30 million. So your investment in AAHno pts could seem small when compared with potential profit? Can you think of a higher profit-margin than two guys standing in the center of the ring with gloves? It's the most successful, highest-grossing event in the history of pay-per-view. There's nothing close, and it comes with very limited promotion. We'll do what we did for every TV show we ever launched: put an exciting promotion behind it. The boxing establishment doesn't understand the entertainment business. I spent my whole career in TV, in syndication. Sports is entertainment. Boxing has an absolutely phenomenal mass of people who watch. Do you believe this venture can be profitable? I was involved with the YankeeNets group, on the board of the New Jersey Devils. One year, we won the World Series. The same year, we won the Stanley Cup. Our revenue point was the highest you can get to. That year, we lost over $100 million. I said to my board at the time, "Boy, thank God we had a good year." The truth is, the bloom is off the rose. You could spend $250 million for the Devils, and the truth is, there will never be a mass appeal for that sport. It does not translate to TV, even if in person it's terribly exciting. Any investment in that, it's not going to grow dramatically. An investment in heavyweight boxing can. If you want to put an N.F.L. team in L.A. right now, you have to put up $1.5 billion. You won't get the returns that Jerry Jones gets. I can tell you right now, I can put up a heavyweight championship fight against any sporting event out there. We will try and bring every weight class back. We're not there yet, but we're off and running. If Dominic wins a gold medal, he's going to be an important professional boxer. Look at the money one fighter can generate. One fighter can make this business investment a phenomenal investment. That's all it takes.