The ‘Ghost’ behind the match
FEW people outside boxing will know the name Al Haymon. Few people inside boxing really know Al Haymon. He has been in boxing for a decade and has yet to give an interview.
What is known is that he is adviser and right-hand-man to Floyd Mayweather and a huge stable of contemporary prominent prize fighters, among them Amir Khan.
Even Mayweather calls Haymon “the Ghost”, but no matter how low he keeps his profile, the 60-year-old Harvard-educated American has seamlessly become one of the most powerful figures in the sport, and has been instrumental behind the scenes in the negotiations for the super-fight between Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao.
Mayweather said recently that had he been with the adviser for his entire career, “I would have been a billionaire by now.”
As it is, under Haymon’s care for just less than a decade, Mayweather will go on to gross more than $500-million (almost R6-billion). It was Haymon who got Mayweather out of his contract with Top Rank for $750 000 in 2006.
Bob Arum, who had been Mayweather’s promoter between 1996 and 2006, the rival negotiator for Pacquiao in the most expensive fight in history, has little to say about Haymon that is complimentary, describing dealing with the businessman as “excruciating”. But it seems to work.
Haymon could also soon be facing a lawsuit from Golden Boy Promotions, boxer Oscar De La Hoya’s company, which is understood to be preparing a case against the manager alleging that he is breaking the Muhammad Ali Act, created in 2000 to prevent managers from also being promoters.
Haymon is licensed in Nevada as a manager, yet Golden Boy Promotions is to claim that he also performs many of the same functions as a promoter.
It was ever thus in boxing, though. Lawsuits are as frequent as left hooks.
While Mayweather basks in the limelight, flashing the cash and inviting as many enemies as he does fans, Haymon arrived in Las Vegas in trademark attire. The New York Times described Haymon as “dressed like a secret agent: black suit, white shirt, dark tie”. The impeccable look transfers to his meticulous business nous, and understanding of promotion.
It seems that as a Harvard Agrade student — with a master’s in economics and business — Haymon could see how to transplant his skills as a strategist into things that entranced him: music, celebrity and sport. Among his celebrity clients in the music industry he can count MC Hammer, New Edition, Whitney Houston and Mary J Blige.
He has also worked in television production, and in 2000, with just one fighter — Vernon Forrest — stepped into boxing. The venture was seen as something of a hobby. Yet Forrest went on to become, for a time, the world’s leading welterweight.
Haymon has operated in the same way in boxing for almost 10 years — there is no office in which to meet him, nowhere to leave him messages. Get through to him on his mobile, and he hangs up. It is unorthodox, but it works.
The boxing stable Haymon now manages is enormous. At welterweight, where the big fights in boxing are being made right now, he has most of the top 10. — © The Daily Telegraph, London
Get through to him on his mobile, and he hangs up. It’s unorthodox, but it works