Federal judge dismisses Golden Boy monopoly lawsuit against boxing manager Al Haymon

[Enlightened-One]

A federal judge in Los Angeles Thursday dismissed the lawsuit by Oscar De La Hoya’s Golden Boy Promotions claiming that rival manager Al Haymon had engaged in monopolistic practices with his Premier Boxing Champions operation.

“Plaintiffs have been unable to present any evidence of harm to competition,” U.S. District Judge John F. Walter wrote at the close of his 24-page decision. “Instead, plaintiffs have merely presented evidence of harm to themselves.”

Michael Williams, an attorney representing Haymon and his company, said in a statement, “We are very pleased with the decision of the court to grant summary judgment and dismiss all of the meritless claims filed by Golden Boy Promotions. The court’s ruling makes clear that the efforts by Haymon Sports were intended to, and actually did, increase competition in the boxing industry, to the benefit of the boxers, other promoters and the fans.”

Golden Boy spokesman Stefan Friedman said, "We are obviously disappointed with the judge's ruling. However, our top priority at Golden Boy is putting on the best fights for the fans and promoting the best shows in the business. We will continue to focus our energies on working with anyone and everyone to make the best fights happen."

Meanwhile, where does Golden Boy go from here? The lawsuit must have cost millions in legal fees… and assuming they don’t appeal the judge’s decision, they’d almost certainly have to pay for the costs of Haymon’s team also. The overall cost of the long-running lawsuit must have been astronomical!

To those people who hated Haymon and constantly criticised the guy, whilst not possessing any facts, what are your thoughts now?

[mistersaintlaurent]

.

[tiny_acres]

Congratulations to Haymon.

[magwitch]

Meanwhile, where does Golden Boy go from here? The lawsuit must have cost millions in legal fees… and assuming they don’t appeal the judge’s decision, they’d almost certainly have to pay for the costs of Haymon’s team also. The overall cost of the long-running lawsuit must have been astronomical!

He lodged a complaint. That doesn’t cost millions at all! This is just bus-stop gossip. It sounds like you have an agenda against De La Hoya..

[Enlightened-One]

Meanwhile, where does Golden Boy go from here? The lawsuit must have cost millions in legal fees… and assuming they don’t appeal the judge’s decision, they’d almost certainly have to pay for the costs of Haymon’s team also. The overall cost of the long-running lawsuit must have been astronomical!

He lodged a complaint. That doesn’t cost millions at all! This is just bus-stop gossip. It sounds like you have an agenda against De La Hoya..

I concede that I speculated about the cost of Golden Boy’s lawsuit, but the whole procedure lasted twenty months, dozens of witnesses were interviewed/deposed, thousands of pages of documentation were scrutinised in fine detail, legislation was verified and judgements from historical court cases reviewed, combined with the legal fees of the court itself.

Considering Oscar De La Hoya’s company would have had to pay for the burden of all these costs (including Haymon’s & the courts’), the expense would have surely been considerable, since the effort involved in a twenty month process has been significant.

Filing a $300m lawsuit lasting almost two years would not have cost pennies… and it would be dishonest of anyone to claim GBP’s wasted expenditure in relation to this matter should considered trivial. Personally-speaking, I’d be surprised if the exercise costs GBP less than $2m.

For the record, I don’t have an agenda. I merely reported facts as they’ve been reported to the media.

That being said, the vast majority of the forum members automatically presume guilt, based on nothing but the “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” justice system, hence my question asking Haymon’s detractors to comment on the judge’s decision.

This forum contains hundreds of derogatory posts about Al Haymon, which includes all sorts of accusations that have been subsequently proven to be incorrect on multiple occasions… and it is my hope that people will finally consider the matter closed and focus their efforts on the sport itself.

Am I wrong?

[Baby Face Finster]

I generally don't post in threads created by Rover, but for this one I think it deserves a SaadOffTheDeck rating of

[Enlightened-One]

It's kind of funny that when Top Rank and Golden Boy both initially filed their lawsuits against Al Haymon, there were lots of highly-viewed threads containing many posts heavily criticising the PBC chief alleging that he's guilty of all sorts of dodgy shenanigans.

However, now that Haymon's name has been cleared of committing any wrongdoing, the forum remains silent on the issue, barring one or two posts complaining about the subject matter being "boring".

I wonder if the board would have remained silent on the matter had Golden Boy's lawsuit been successful, with Haymon subsequently filing for bankruptcy due to paying $300m in damages?

It's strange that people prefer to remain silent on a previously popular topic after being subsequently proven wrong about their extremely derogatory claims.

[RScarf1]

BoxRec may want to change the first sentence in its bio page of Haymon: "Al Haymon is a so-called adviser, manager, and/or promoter to many top boxers in the United States." I know that BoxRec gets information from Wikipedia, so this probably was written about Haymon previously on his Wikipedia page.