The boxing world involves a lot of unusual characters and wild claims. Both of those are on display in a lawsuit filed by former Top Rank “fixer” Billy Keane this week against that promotion and its president Todd duBoef, as Ryan Glasspiegel of Front Office Sports reported:
Top Rank “fixer” Billy Keane has made wild allegations about the way the fight promotion company handled its relationship with ESPN.
Keane also says they stiffed him on “millions” in promised pay.
Story ⬇️
— Front Office Sports (@FOS) February 28, 2025
Keane, who calls himself a “fixer” who was brought in to help Top Rank land fighters and manage the promotion’s relationship with ESPN, makes a lot of claims in there. He says he’s suffered more than $25 million in “material and consequential damages,” with some of that involving not being paid the promised amount for bringing in new fighters. But what’s perhaps particularly interesting is what he has to say about that Top Rank-ESPN relationship, a deal opted to not renew last month after eight years.
Per the lawsuit, Keane’s involvement there took some notable turns in 2021. That came when Mike Coppinger wrote a story in The Athletic that included an email from duBoef to then-incoming DAZN chair Kevin Mayer taking exception to Matchroom and DAZN bidding on a Teófimo López fight against George Kambosos Jr. (which eventually landed at Triller, then went to DAZN and Matchroom after the International Boxing Federation found Triller defaulted on its obligation to stage the fight, and wound up producing an unexpected loss for Lopez and a big success for DAZN) given Top Rank’s role in bringing Lopez to prominence. Here’s more from the suit on that:
From 2020 through 2023, duBoef repeatedly used Keane as his “fixer”with ESPN. For example, in 2020 duBoef was caught attempting to rig a public pursebid for a championship bout featuring Top Rank fighter Teofimo Lopez. duBoef’s emails were exposed in which he was expressly attempting to keep competitors from participating in the bidding process for the fight so that Top Rank could purchase the fight for a cheap price and suppress the purses of the participating fighters.
After the emails were exposed in an article by The Athletic, Top Rank went on to lose the purse bid and the right to promote the bout of its star boxer, Lopez. duBoef called Keane in a panic. He told Keane to call senior ESPN executives and explain that this was not duBoef’s fault and try to place blame elsewhere. Then, when Lopez found out about duBoef’s scheme, he publicly wrote “Todd DuBoef you won’t have me back. Get ready because we going to war! You prick. How dare you try to cock block my purse bid.”
duBoef asked Keane to make contact with Lopez to try and smooth things over so he would stop publicly criticizing him. He advised Keane to pretend to work for ESPN and assure Lopez that ESPN was very happy with him and excited to continue working together.
…Even more shockingly, on two occasions, duBoef asked Keane to have ESPN employees fired. duBoef perceived the two employees in question (one, a programming executive; the other, a reporter) as potential threats to his relationship, and he wanted Keane to use his personal relationships with senior ESPN executives to remove them.
As per Glasspiegel, “A source told FOS that the employees were programming executive Matt Kenny and boxing reporter Mike Coppinger, who wrote the story at The Athletic that incensed Lopez before joining ESPN.” So that’s certainly a notable claim, although the lawsuit doesn’t provide more details on how duBoef asked that and how serious he was.
We have seen broadcasters in the combat sports world part ways with talent their programming partners have grievances with, so it’s not inconceivable that this could have led to Coppinger and Keane exiting ESPN. But it’s unclear if Keane ever took this to anyone at ESPN, and Coppinger and Kenny (an ESPN vice president of programming and acquisitions) remain employed there. At any rate, though, the claim that duBoef tried to get Keane to get those ESPN figures fired is remarkable.
It’s also bizarre to read that duBoef “advised Keane to pretend to work for ESPN and assure Lopez that ESPN was very happy with him and excited to continue working together.” Seemingly, that would have fallen down at the first hurdle when Lopez’s camp looked up Keane and realized he was connected with Top Rank and not the broadcaster. But this lawsuit overall does point to blurry layers of ESPN and Top Rank overlap, and Keane certainly had some involvement in managing that ESPN relationship, so perhaps he was indeed able to convince Lopez; Lopez returned to ESPN platforms for his subsequent fights.
There are also a lot of provocative claims in here on Tyson Fury manager Daniel Kinahan, and duBoef’s alleged instructions to Keane to keep ESPN from learning of Kinahan’s involvement with Fury’s fights. Here’s what the lawsuit says there about duBoef’s response to a January 2019 notification from Keane that Kinahan was his contact with Fury:
When Keane discussed Kinahan’s proposal with duBoef, duBoef provided very specific instructions. He authorized Keane to move forward, but he admonished Keane that ESPN could not find out that Kinahan was involved. According to duBoef, the Irish press had reported that Kinahan was the head of a drug cartel, and if duBoef were linked to Kinahan, ESPN might be forced to terminate their deal.
Keane’s next set of instructions also came directly from duBoef. First, duBoef directed Keane to fly to Dubai immediately, meet with Kinahan, and get Fury to sign with Top Rank before his upcoming rematch with Deontay Wilder was announced. Second, Keane was told to call ESPN executives and get them “excited” about carrying Fury’s rematch with Wilder. Third, because Top Rank would need additional funding from ESPN to sign Fury, duBoef told Keane to push that agenda internally at ESPN.
Despite having legitimate concerns for his own personal safety, Keane did not quarrel with duBoef’s orders. Keane had conversations directly with ESPN executives who had expressed extreme frustration with Top Rank and duBoef. ESPN was running out of patience and losing faith in Top Rank’s ability to sign A-list fighters, and Keane also believed that if Top Rank could secure Fury-Wilder II, ESPN’s concerns would be allayed.
This claim is interesting, because just how problematic it is would heavily depend on the details of what Keane was instructed to do to avoid ESPN finding out about Kinahan’s involvement. There’s a big difference between not disclosing something not asked about and active misrepresentation. And there would also be questions here in relation to the Top Rank-ESPN contracts and what they required Top Rank to disclose to the broadcaster about its fight-making process and its contracts.
In any case, Kinahan’s involvement with Fury (through his MTK Global company), which included guaranteeing Fury’s purse for that rematch against Wilder, came to light pretty quickly once the Fury-Top Rank deal was signed. And Top Rank chairman and CEO Bob Arum (duBoef’s father-in-law) had some significant remarks on that deal in a March 2019 FightHype article on Keane, calling him ” a free agent” rather than a Top Rank employee:
The Deontay Wilder fight with Tyson Fury is something that we would love to do, and that’s a real goal and it’s something that we will do. Billy Keane, who is a very, very close friend of Jimmy Pitaro, the head of ESPN, was doing something totally different in the Mideast with MTK Global and it was obvious that Tyson Fury could be in play. So Billy talked to Tyson Fury and explained what it would mean for him to come with Top Rank and get the exposure that ESPN, the greatest megaphone in sports, could give him.
…That’s really our goal. When Billy was talking to him, you know, Billy is not an employee to Top Rank. He’s a free agent. When hecame back and talked to us about his conversations with Tyson Fury, we said we could offer him X and Y, and then when Billy offered that, he was talking to Top Rank. In other words, he is not a guy who makes up a number and then comes back to Top Rank and says, “We need this number.” When he offers a fighter something, it’s with the approval of not only Top Rank, but ESPN.
But, yeah, there are issues with Kinahan. He was named the head of the Kinahan Organized Crime Gang alongside his father, Christy, and brother, Christopher, in 2022 in a joint announcement by Irish and American authorities, which included freezing his assets, and he remains wanted by police in both countries. And, interestingly enough, at that time, Arum had quite the comments about Kinahan and their five years working with him (which predates the Fury deal) to Kevin Iole at Yahoo:
“Kinahan called me and we had a long conversation,” Arum told Yahoo Sports. “He has kids and he said he wanted to get out of that other stuff. He said to me, ‘Bob, I’ve done some bad things in my life. I admit that. But I’m not involved with that any more. I’m just trying to clean up my life and be a legitimate business man.’ I wasn’t involved in any of the things he might have done before and he was telling me he wasn’t doing anything.”
But Arum said after a smooth working relationship for a while, things began to change. Kinahan began to use bully tactics, Arum said, at the same time he was hearing that Kinahan may still have been involved in questionable activities.
Arum said that’s when his company began to fully disassociate with him.
“There came a time that we discovered that he might still have been involved in some nefarious activities,” Arum said. “That was enough for us.”
At any rate, this lawsuit is at a very early stage, and none of these allegations have been proven in court. And Top Rank has not yet filed their own response. But Keane’s claims here about duBoef’s instructions to him are quite something, especially around trying to fire ESPN employees, misrepresenting his own role with ESPN, and hiding information on Kinahan from the network. This will be a lawsuit to watch.
