By Monwabisi Jimlongo
Kyle de Klerk has offered diplomatic answers on why ESPN has stopped showing South African boxing tournaments after the channel showed a record 12 shows last year.
De Klerk said that ESPN decided against continuing to show SA boxing tournaments because the company is taking a different direction as it is streamlining its operations.
“Disney right now are going through significant changes globally. Budgets and redundancy going across the business. From a business perspective, we are evaluating all the businesses right now. Boxing is one of those,” De Klerk, who is Walt Disney Company’s director of sport in Africa, said.
Ink Sport can reveal that the initial directive from Disney was that ESPN would show boxing as long as the content is also shown by a network with the most amount of viewers, the SABC in this case. However, the contract between ESPN and the SABC was only for one year.
On the SABC agreement, De Klerk said: “I can’t really divulge that. There’s contractual elements to that. It wasn’t just boxing, it was more of a content agreement.”
