Art of the deal
The complex tale of money and egos behind NZ boxing’s must-see bout
“I don’t do it for the money. I do it to do it. Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks.”
Donald Trump, The Art of the Deal
As a callow 29-year-old, David Higgins saw the boxing documentary When We Were Kings. He had a big idea, and took a massive punt in staging the David TuaShane Cameron Fight of The Century. It was 200 seconds of brutality, which made millions.
A decade and some huge deals later, Higgins believes he’s got something even bigger: a bout between his charge, former world champion Joseph Parker and the only other world-ranked New Zealand heavyweight, Junior Fa.
To make this fight, Higgins concurrently negotiated about 20 key contracts: international and domestic television, sponsorship, venue, government and fighters, plus merchandising, ticketing, catering, corporate tables and undercard fighters.
But the hard work is dealing with the egos and aspirations of two heavyweight boxers and their heavyweight backers in New Zealand, the UK, and the USA, agreeing drug protocols and settling petty arguments over which brand of glove to use. On the table, $1m to $2m in prize money.
At least 18 months in the offing and with coronavirus stalling the world, it shapes to be the single biggest spectator event in the country in 2020. Higgins, who knows how to sell something, declares: “It could be one of the biggest events in our sporting history. It could also become quite a pop culture phenomenon.”
Unlike your standard business deal, says Higgins, boxing doesn’t negotiate in secret around a boardroom table then issue a sober press statement. Boxing does it in public: outrage at your fighter being underpaid, emotional ‘callouts’, big-time spruiking.
“Why do you think people loved the Tiger King? It was crazy people doing crazy s... Boxing is crazy people doing crazy s… and it’s real,” he enthuses. This is the art of making one unusual deal happen.
‘‘My style of deal making is quite simple and straightforward. I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing to get what I’m after.’’ – Donald Trump
‘‘Hatch your plan in darkness and come down with it like thunder,’’ grins Junior Fa’s manager, former Olympic athlete Mark Keddell. ‘‘I haven’t read the book The Art of War, but that’s what it says and that’s how we’ve played it. We’ve stayed in darkness for 10 years, knowing we were doing this the whole way.’’
(He’s close. The actual quote from the 6th century BC Chinese war tactician Sun Tzu is: ‘‘Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.’’)
The dance that will lead to Spark Arena in Auckland on December 11 has certainly been a slow one.
You could date it back to 2009, when a 20-yearold Fa beat an 18-year-old Parker for the New Zealand amateur super-heavyweight title. As amateurs, they fought four times, winning two each.
When Harvard-educated lawyer Lou DiBella, one of America’s biggest boxing promoters, signed a virtually-unknown Fa to a promotional contract in 2017, it was this ‘‘storyline’’ that attracted him. Yes, he says, a Parker fight was already on his mind. ‘‘But it had to be under the right set of circumstances. It had to be the biggest payday of Junior’s career, it had to be a moment when it was a significant event.’’
Fa actually quit boxing after representing Tonga at the 2010 Commonwealth Games. He returned in 2016, inspired by a newspaper story about the emergence of a newly-professional Parker.
Parker, powered by Higgins’ company Duco, would win a world title over Andy Ruiz, then lose to Anthony Joshua in a lucrative four-title unification bout in 2018.
It was not so glamorous for Fa. A foreman in an aluminium joinery factory, he fought nine times inside nine months of turning professional, to fill out his record before his opponents’ pricetags rose. Often he’d no idea who he was fighting, only that they posed no real danger.
Boxing managers pad their fighters’ unbeaten records with selected opponents until they reach the big stage. ‘‘The strategy was if we had to fight for free, we would fight for free… he would be lucky to get [paid] a table for his parents to sit at,’’ says Keddell.
Fa’s 15th fight was against a Mexican journeyman, Luis Pasquali, and cost his camp $60,000 to stage. ‘‘How can you do that in New Zealand?’’ says Keddell. ‘‘You can’t sell $60,000 of [corporate] tables.’’
Along came DiBella, who pioneered pay-perview boxing on the US network HBO and has a 64-strong stable of professional fighters. It meant Fa could go full-time.
DiBella expects two of every 10 fighters he signs to make it big, and about four years for them to repay his outlay: ‘‘It’s a risky proposition.’’ Fa is now on the verge of making him some profit.
DiBella took him to fight in Alabama, South Dakota, California and Utah and Fa won them all, but not always convincingly, due to ill-health and other distractions, such as his father’s death.
But on June 28 this year, Fa was to headline a card celebrating DiBella’s induction into Boxing’s Hall of Fame. Keddell says a good performance would have secured a personal TV deal with Showtime: the ‘‘golden goose’’.
Then Covid closed in, the induction was postponed, and Fa found himself relying on sponsors, frugal living and his wife’s teaching job to get by.
DiBella Entertainment, meanwhile, shut down, DiBella’s two minor league baseball teams on hiatus, most of his boxers inactive. ‘‘I’ve been better, my friend,’’ DiBella says. ‘‘These are trying times, and unusual times for the whole world – and I’m not going to complain because there are so many people worse off than me.’’
‘‘The worst thing you can possibly do in a deal is seem desperate to make it. That makes the other guy smell blood, and then you’re dead.’’
– Donald Trump
Covid added a twist, but the paths of Joseph Parker and Junior Fa began an inevitable collision course on December 15, 2018, at Christchurch’s Horncastle Arena. Fa was the lead undercard, winning inside a round. Parker, rebuilding after defeats to Joshua and another Brit, Dillian Whyte, was the headline, defeating Alexander Flores.
At the pre-fight weigh-in, Parker’s trainer Kevin Barry publicly challenged Fa, saying he was ducking his man. After the fight, Barry told media: ‘‘No more Junior Fa questions.’’
Keddell says Higgins had been asking him to ‘call out’ (a boxing term and standard PR stunt for challenging another fighter) Parker to drive publicity. Fa was too humble, so Keddell would do it, but it wasn’t genuine – they didn’t want the fight yet.
Fa recalls being asked about fighting Parker – a lot – but knew he was a virtual unknown back then. ‘‘I think at that time, it was just hard to avoid the question,’’ he says. ‘‘I knew I was ready – but it was (about) trying to build up a bit of fanbase, so the fight makes more sense towards the public.’’
But Higgins, a keen strategist, was playing the long game that in time it would be useful to have a readymade local opponent for Parker with the profile to sell TV and tickets.
Keddell says this was when a fight was first pitched, with Fa offered $70,000, though that seems to have been a casual offer. Keddell suggested a pricetag of $500,000. ‘‘The reward just wasn’t worth the risk,’’ Fa explains.
Keddell was also playing a long game – essentially, to ignore Higgins: ‘‘The more he talked, the less we did. It was quite funny ... we were slowly moving him into the position where we wanted him.
‘‘The more David Higgins wants something, the more he goes in the media, the more he tries to embarrass you... I said to Lou, the easy thing is not to talk.’’
Higgins doesn’t deny using the media as leverage. Without publicity, he says, three of his biggest fights – Tua v Cameron, Parker v Joshua, and this one – wouldn’t have happened. In particular, he provoked a reluctant Joshua into battle by criticising his ‘glass jaw’.
This time, it didn’t work immediately. Eventually, in March, Higgins and DiBella talked, with $200,000 mentioned.
The obstacle at Fa’s end was a contract clause that DiBella would get the overseas television rights if he had a major fight in New Zealand.
But Parker’s overseas rights are owned by his British promoter Matchroom. DiBella needed to be compensated – understood to be around $200,000 – so that original offer would have left Fa with nothing.
Higgins toyed with a super-exclusive, corporate-only bout, perhaps somewhere like Queenstown, and investigated bringing in an Australian opponent, only for quarantine restrictions to kill that plan, before returning with offers at $330,000, then finally at $500,000. A deal was struck. Almost.
While the numbers were sorted a long time ago, negotiating the minutiae of the fight contract took weeks. The deal was only done the night before its scheduled announcement, on Tuesday October 6.
In part, the delays seemed a ruse from Keddell
‘‘I’m not a very big fan of our president. It’s an ironic title in my view … it gives far too much credit to Donald Trump, because it suggests he is somehow a good businessman when the truth is he was a dismal failure.’’ Lou DiBella
to (successfully) annoy Higgins. Keddell’s key demands were for the fighters to use the same gloves, sealed and presented on the night, rather than choose their own; for the amateur organisation NZ Boxing to sanction the fight, rather than the professional NZ Professional Boxing; and Drug Free Sport, not the World AntiDoping Agency, to handle drug-testing.
‘‘The great Anaru Harriman [a Kiwi boxing trainer] once said to me ‘cheating doesn’t get you, naivete gets you’, so we know what tricks can happen,’’ Keddell says. ‘‘I’m not saying they will use those tricks on us, I am saying that in the contract, we won’t allow those tricks to happen.’’
Keddell consulted former insiders like Higgins’ ex-business partner Dean Lonergan, and retired fighter Brian Minto, who both faced Parker and was trained by Barry.
Eventually, compromises were made. ‘‘Sometimes in boxing, the hardest people to do deals with are the novices, because it is their 15 minutes of fame,’’ gibes Higgins. ‘‘It’s their big show so they agonise over every little thing.’’
He laughs, and jokes he will ‘‘mentor’’ Keddell through, but wants to make one thing clear: ‘‘We made this fight happen … he had no control over what happened or not.’’
And when he considers the idea this story may juxtapose their respective managerial skills, Higgins says: ‘‘It’s like having a story about a gunfight between Clint Eastwood and Jabba the Hutt.’’
But in truth, they are similar types: convivial, engaging, conversation-dominating characters with plenty of drive. When Keddell was at the zenith of his hospitality career, he provided food and alcohol for Higgins’ fights and venues for press conferences and after-parties.
‘‘This is a game between a couple of people that know each other. It’s all strategy,’’ says Keddell. ‘‘We’re friends but it doesn’t mean we can’t get one up on each other.’’
Keddell ran the 200m at the Atlanta Olympics and was briefly faster than Carl Lewis; he then launched a hospitality company, Pack and Co, whose empire stretched to 32 venues. Keddell then struck out alone, but was bankrupted in October 2019, after his Wagamama chain fell over owing $4.8m.
He calls it ‘‘getting nailed’’ and ascribes it to declining health, with undiagnosed Type 1 diabetes leaving him so afflicted he could barely see, and giving him headaches performing simple tasks like grocery-shopping.
A doctor told him he had a year left unless his condition improved. He says he never realised how impaired his business skills became. ‘‘I lost so much when I didn’t need to, and other people lost stuff, and I found that really hard and I was upset about it, but then I decided to rip the rear vision mirror off and just look forward.’’
Keddell works for free for Fa (he’s legally unable to charge him anyway) as his panacea. Walking out ringside provides a bigger buzz than the Olympics. ‘‘And all I really do is wash the mouthguard.’’
‘‘The worst of times often create the best opportunities to make good deals.’’ – Donald Trump
Joseph Parker sounds mildly exasperated when he reveals he’s actually guaranteed less for this fight than Junior Fa. ‘‘They asked for a ridiculous amount of money, in my opinion – I don’t think he’s ever fought for more than $30k before,’’ says Parker.
But Parker is financially astute. If the fight is a big financial success, he will be well rewarded.
Parker sees the fight as a joint venture with Higgins – who has become a close friend – and will scrutinise every line item in the budget from catering to marketing. ‘‘I’ve agreed to it [less money] because I want the fight to happen. And I want Dave to put it on and not lose money on it.’’
Higgins has had no income since February – closing his offices in Auckland and Melbourne and putting staff, including himself, on reduced wages. But at Level 1 and an events pipeline ahead, he’s optimistic. ‘‘I’m still standing after 10 years in this game,’’ he says. The deal, he says, is ‘‘intricately’’ constructed to remove risk, ensure everyone’s paid and there’s good profit if it succeeds.
He’s negotiated sponsor and broadcaster guarantees, including what appears to be a guaranteed minimum figure from Spark Sport, who beat Sky for the rights, and the $15,000 ringside tables are already sold out: the rich-listers aren’t in Europe this year.
Parker says he isn’t particularly motivated by the money. ‘‘I’ve put my money into smart places, I think,’’ he says. ‘‘But the main driver is not money, it is about ambition: to be two-time world champion.’’
In that, he and Fa are alike. Fa actually believes top boxers are paid too much. ‘‘If you can make a ridiculous amount of money, then you definitely should, because it is such a dangerous sport,’’ he says. ‘‘But, hey, you shouldn’t be too greedy ... I just want a comfortable life: I don’t want a plane or 20 boats.’’
‘‘I always go into the deal anticipating the worst. If you can live with the worst, the good will always take care of itself.’’
– Donald Trump
‘‘Idon’t do win-lose deals,’’ says David Higgins. ‘‘If you do deals where you win, and someone else loses, you are conning people. Donald Trump would have done a lifetime of win-lose deals where he cons people and he probably feels good about it… I’d feel s…’’
The win for Fa is prestige and a payday and even a close defeat is marketable. DiBella reckons: ‘‘Junior is going to be bigger coming out of this fight than he is now, no matter what.’’
But for Parker?
One boxing insider says: ‘‘Joe is the fight. The numbers that have been talked about are big numbers, and I don’t see this fight supporting those. I don’t understand the risk for Joe.’’
Yes, says Higgins, if Parker loses, it’s ‘‘catastrophic’’. Parker says people have told him he should retire if he loses. He has some insurance in a re-match clause, and keeping active is vital because otherwise he’d move down the World Boxing Organisation’s ranking list (he’s presently third). A win would most likely give him a mandatory title challenge. ‘‘Boxing is a risk business,’’ says Higgins. ‘‘If you’re scared of risk, you shouldn’t be in the business. Joseph is taking a haircut and risking all he has achieved… because it’s the only realistic option, but also a good option.’’
Ultimately, then, everybody wins. And that’s the best sort of deal you can ever make.
Footnote: Higgins and DiBella have never met, but they have a prime opportunity to bond. Told of this story’s title, DiBella says: ‘‘I’m not a very big fan of our president. It’s an ironic title in my view … it gives far too much credit to Donald Trump, because it suggests he is somehow a good businessman when the truth is he was a dismal failure.’’
Higgins, a keen and outspoken political student, says: ‘‘I’d just like to point out that I despise Donald Trump and his populist demagoguery. He’s a fake. I cannot stand him.’’
It seems even in boxing, a world quite accommodating of chancers, rogues and charlatans, tolerance doesn’t stretch far enough to put up with the US President.