Counted Out : Crowds for Arena Boxing Events in Orange County Are Usually Just a Drop in the Pond

It’s 6:45 p.m., 30 minutes before fight time, and there are almost as many employees in the Pond as boxing fans.

By 9 p.m., when ring announcer Jimmy Lennon Jr. introduces the main event between flyweights Miguel Angel Granados and Arthur Johnson, another 2,000 people have wandered into this spacious building. Some have paid for their seats, most have not. Of the 2,092 who attended the Dec. 2 show, 1,838 were complimentary tickets, according to State Athletic Commission figures.

A building that holds 20,000 people was nearly 90% empty at this, the Pond’s final Monday night show in 1996. The other five cards didn’t fare much better, averaging between 2,000 and 2,500 fans and never drawing more than 700 paying customers.

Even the show’s co-promoter, Forum Boxing’s John Jackson, had a hard time putting a positive spin on his group’s first year at the Pond.

“We need to do a better job of getting things out to the public,” Jackson said. “And we’re going to do that with better marketing. Hopefully, we’ll see some results very quickly. We know there’s a lot of fans in Orange County that like to see live boxing. But for some reason, they don’t know it’s happening.”

The Pond, which co-promotes the shows with Forum Boxing, tried to get the word out early to the Latino community. It spent nearly $100,000 on advertising with Latino media outlets for its debut in February. Forum Boxing did its part by putting some fairly well-known Latino boxers on the card, but only 684 tickets were sold. And 1,861 were given away.

Five shows later, the Pond and Forum Boxing are still looking for Latino boxing fans, Anglo boxing fans . . . in fact, any boxing fan will do.

Asked to characterize the state of big-time boxing in Orange County, Forum Boxing publicist John Beyrooty said: “The state is somewhere hovering around comatose.”

Said Jackson: “We knew this wasn’t going to be easy, but we had to get started.”

Will they finish what they started? The Pond and Forum Boxing have two years left on a three-year contract to stage Monday night shows every other month. The first card of the new year will be Feb. 3, featuring featherweight Juan Manuel Marquez (18-1, 13 knockouts) of Mexico City against Cedric Bimgo (22-7-1, 10 knockouts) of Brockton, Mass., for the vacant North American Boxing Organization title.

But neither Jackson nor Pond Assistant General Manager Tim Ryan seemed to be looking beyond 1997.

“We want to go another six [shows] to see if we can do it here,” Jackson said.

Said Ryan: “We’re committed to three years, but Ogden Entertainment’s contract with John Jackson has some flexibility built into it. Our desire is never to get into it and then get out. Our goal is to make [boxing] one of the mainstay events here. But if this were easy, there’d be more than two promoters in Orange County.”

Roy Englebrecht, who promotes a monthly club boxing show in Irvine, is trying not to gloat, but he’s having a hard time. Englebrecht, who regularly fills 90% of 1,200 seats for his Irvine Marriott boxing cards, said he briefly considered staging shows at the Pond but was skeptical that big-time boxing could work in Orange County.

“It would have been silly for me to try that,” he said. “Why jeopardize a show that didn’t have a losing night in 12 years? I’m a firm believer that 50% of something is better than 100% of nothing.”

Englebrecht, who has been involved with the Marriott for 10 of the shows’ 12 years, also believes “empty seats breed empty seats.”

“What makes the ‘Battle in the Ballroom’ so unique is we don’t have empty seats,” he said.

If Englebrecht was ever going to have empty seats, it was last week. He was putting on a Saturday night show three days after Christmas, a time when many people are either traveling or without disposable income to spend on entertainment.

At 10:30 Friday night, junior featherweight Martin Solorio--one of the main-event fighters--pulled out and had to be replaced by Salvador Perez of Mexico.

The Marriott show, headlined by a Perez-David Vasquez eight-round main event, still drew a near-capacity crowd of 1,121 and took in $26,195 in gate receipts, more than any Pond Monday night boxing series did in 1996. Beyrooty said he is baffled by the Marriott shows’ success over the years.

“There’s no explanation to why they sell out that ballroom,” he said. “It can’t be the quality of fights or the names of the main-event fighters. They’re just listing a date and putting on fights. Roy took a good event and was smart enough to keep it going. Could you imagine if we put on an eight-round main event?”

But Englebrecht contends the phenomenon of the “Battle in the Ballroom” is no coincidence.

He said he’s able to get away with an occasional eight-round main event because he offers his customers competitive fights for a fair price (prices range from $25 to $35), promising local fighters, and a clean environment. Englebrecht said he has been able to make a 20% profit--or about $5,000 a show--by keeping his costs down.

He pays most of his fighters between $500 and $2,000 a night. He has no secretary. He has one matchmaker. One person--Jeff Clark--handles public relations, marketing, operations and corporate sales. His advertising budget is almost nonexistent.

Over 10 years, Englebrecht has compiled a mailing list of 4,200 boxing fans and spends $1,000 a month on a mailer.

“We don’t advertise to the masses,” Englebrecht said. “We discovered the 2% we need to find.”

Englebrecht often greets customers at the door and takes them to their seat.

“To me, the customer is king,” he said. But even Englebrecht has had his disasters. Last year, he helped promote a show at Long Beach State’s Pyramid that lost $20,000 and put the promoters out of business. Fortunately for Englebrecht, he was one of the few people who got paid.

On Thursday, he was scheduled to begin a monthly card at the Woodland Hills Warner Center Marriott. But he canceled the show after welterweight Mark Lewis became ill and pulled out of the main event. Englebrecht said he also was worried about competing with Cedric Kushner’s heavyweight promotion at the Beverly Wilshire that same night and a card at the Hollywood Palladium, featuring Orange County’s Carlos Palomino and Gerrie Coetzee, on the following night.

“We haven’t lost any money and I don’t want to start,” said Englebrecht, who still plans to promote monthly shows at Warner Center.

Forum Boxing, however, is able to gamble more than Englebrecht because of their television contract with Fox Sports West, which televises its Monday shows at the Pond and the Forum. The $40,000 Fox Sports West pays for broadcasting rights to each show helps offset Forum Boxing’s costs, but the live television undoubtedly also keeps some fans at home.

Ryan admits the Pond has lost money on the Monday shows, but he said the arena turned a profit on boxing in 1996 because of two events featuring Julio Cesar Chavez. The Pond sold 19,700 tickets for the Chavez-Oscar De La Hoya closed-circuit card and sold another 3,000 at the Anaheim Convention Center. A live Chavez fight with Joey Gamache, promoted by Top Rank, drew about 10,000.

But Forum Boxing can’t afford to pay Chavez, De La Hoya or even Genaro Hernandez to appear on their Monday night shows. But it can stage entertaining, competitive fights such as the Alfred Ankamah-Antonio Margarito welterweight bout on Oct. 14 and hope people are interested enough to come out.

Beyrooty said most of the fights and fighters are entertaining, but he’s having a hard time selling that to the local media.

“Some of these little Mexican fighters have great stories to tell, but if you’re unwilling to tell them, who’s going to know about them,” he said. “There’s only a handful of guys you can count on to draw people, and the rest of them, nobody has heard of.”

Which is why Ryan said a major marketing effort will be put forth this year to create awareness. Another new twist that already started with the December show is a pre-fight party for season-ticket holders and prospective season holders. The party was attended by more than 200 people and was held on the floor adjacent to the ring.

But the party may be over for Forum Boxing and the Pond if people don’t start coming through the turnstiles. And paying for it, although complimentary tickets are part of the boxing game. The state commission also counts as complimentary sponsor tickets that the Pond trades out.

Ryan said he hopes by the end of his three-year contract with Forum Boxing, the Pond is consistently drawing 4,000 fans for Monday night shows.

“You hope as time goes by you begin to build a base here,” Jackson said. “We can’t afford to lose people here because then we lose some of our season-ticket holders at the Forum too. Our reputation is on the line.

“We went into this with our eyes wide open. Had we had the huge success, we’d be surprised. I’m very confident 1997 will be a great year and we’ll expand the base of Orange County boxing fans.”