How a newspaper article led to Joe Hand Promotions, from projector CCTV to North American sports bar dominance

If you’re watching a boxing, UFC, wrestling, or other premium or pay-per-view event at a bar in North America, there’s a good chance Joe Hand Promotions played a role in that. The company is the largest North American distributor of premium sports programming to commercial establishments (bars, restaurants, casinos, and more), working with DirecTV, Dish, cable, and streaming platforms, including DAZN for Saturday’s Jake Paul-Julio César Chávez Jr. fight. And they hit several high-water marks in 2024. But, as company president Joe Hand Jr. told Awful Announcing in a recent interview, that all stems from his father reading a newspaper article about Joe Frazier.

“He read an article in the Philadelphia Daily News one time where it said this group of prominent businessmen were starting a company called Cloverlay. And the purpose of that company was to manage the boxing career of this fighter that was coming back from the Olympics in 1964, Joe Frazier, with a gold medal and a broken thumb.

“And Joe trained right away. He had family and some kids, and he was trying to figure it out. And these six businessmen decided that they were going to put Joe on the payroll, and they were going to give him a paycheck every week, so all he would’ve had to do was worry about training to become the best fighter he could. Well, that story resonated with the Philadelphia sports fan and the Philadelphia newspapers, and they wrote the story.”

That article came at a notable time for the senior Joe Hand. He was a police officer in Philadelphia, but had been reassigned to an undesirable overnight gig patrolling the subway. When he read that article on Frasier, he wanted to get involved.

“My dad wrote a postcard to one of those principals, one of those six people,” Joe Hand Jr. said. “And when he wrote the postcard, remarkably, they got back to him. Dr. Baldwin owned a company called Baldwin Dairies. He was a very successful guy. And he said, ‘You’re in.’ He goes, ‘Come to the next meeting. We’d love to have a cop in. You have to bring $500 in, and we’ll see you at the next meeting. So my dad hangs up the phone, he’s stunned.

“And then he thinks to himself, ‘Damn, where am I going to get the 500 bucks? I don’t have it.’ He was making $7,500 a year as a cop. So he went to the police and fire credit union, borrowed the $500, showed up and became one of the first investors in Cloverlay.”

That company became a dramatic success in its own right, with Hand Jr. comparing his dad’s initial investment to buying early Apple stock at $10. But Hand Sr. then kept buying more stock, and having more time than the other principals, he took on a management role with Cloverlay.

“He became one of the biggest investors, he owned more, and he kept buying more and more stock,” Hand said. “But he said ‘I was getting the education of a lifetime.’ He had never gone to college, only graduated from high school, and he said, ‘I’m hanging around with all these really smart business guys, and you’d just have to be asleep not to get better.’

“And he was getting educated and they were coaching him and showing him and teaching him. So he actually became what I would call the business manager for Cloverlay, because the other guys were wealthy guys. They didn’t need another job. They wanted somebody to run the organization. And my dad became that guy.”

That paid off for Hand Sr. with Cloverlay, but Hand Jr. told AA the even bigger boost came from those other investors encouraging his father to start Joe Hand Promotions to handle closed-circuit TV broadcasts of Frazier’s fights.

“This whole idea of closed-circuit TV started, and they were like, ‘Joe, people are saying this could be a way for us to show our boxing events. Can you figure it out for us?’ He went to the library, he looked up closed circuit tv, and he came back and he goes, ‘Look, I think we can put a projector up in a movie theater, a high school gym, an auditorium, arenas around the country and sell tickets. And I think people will come.’

“And sure enough, he did it. And it became another way for at that time in the early seventies for people that were boxing fans to go and watch fights. I always call it the earliest form of pay-per-view tv. And it’s morphed into what it has along the way.”

“They made him start his own company, Joe Hand Promotions, to try to keep that business separate from the Cloverlay business. So almost reluctantly, they talked him into it. And they were coaching him up on how to run the business, on what to do. But my dad was a hardworking guy. He was a gambler, a true gambler, a gambler even with business. He took risks. And there were many times when they did those fights in the early years, he didn’t make money on some of them, and he was ready to quit.”

Despite some early struggles, Joe Hand Promotions established itself and got bigger and bigger, led by Joe Hand Sr. (who passed away last summer at 87, but remained involved in the company almost up to his death) and Jr. for that whole time. And what it has morphed into is indeed remarkable.

Joe Hand Promotions now works with national chains such as Buffalo Wild Wings and Dave & Buster’s, regional franchises such as Miller’s Ale House and Hops, and more than 10,000 independently owned and operated sports bars and restaurants. 2024 saw them hit all-time record marks in subscriptions for ESPN+ For Business, WWE, and DAZN Boxing, plus set an all-time commercial establishments record for a single event for Netflix’s Jake Paul-Mike Tyson fight. Here’s a look at some of its promotional posters over the years:

Joe Hand Promotions now has 50-plus employees, which is a long way from its beginnings. But Hand told AA he didn’t even want to get involved with it at first.

“I didn’t want to work in it. I really, really didn’t. The business has been around for 54 years and that means that at 67, I was just a teenager when literally the basement of our house was converted into an office. My father was there, and he and his sister, my aunt Pat, who’s 80 years old and still working here, were working in the basement of the house. And I’d come home from school and they’re like, ‘Hey, put your bag down. We need to get these press releases folded and labeled and stamped and get ’em out the door.’

“It didn’t sound real glamorous at the time. It didn’t feel that way. And so I graduated from a small school in Northeastern Pennsylvania, King’s College, and I came home. I had recently got engaged and my father asked me if I would help him out on a fight that he had gotten the rights to, which was Sugar Ray Leonard against Roberto Duran in the first fight in June of 1980.

“To be really honest, I knew that the business was in the house, but I never paid attention to it. I didn’t know what the hell they were doing. I knew they were down there making money, I guess, or whatever. Hopefully they were. But it didn’t matter to me.”

But Hand said he was willing to help out for that fight.

“So I went to work with my dad, and I told him I was going to do one fight. And he said, ‘Well, look, I’m going to make you my partner on this.’ I was like half paying attention. I knew I was getting a paycheck every week, which is great because I’m trying to get some money for a down payment on the deposit on a rental apartment or something.

“And when the fight was over, he came over and he gave me an envelope and he goes, ‘Here, this is yours.’ And I opened it up and there was this really a large check in there and I was like, ‘What’s this for?’ And he goes, ‘Well, that’s your share of the fight.’ I go, ‘Wait, I was getting paid, I got paid.’ He goes, ‘I told you you were my partner.’ I’m like, ‘Wow.’

“And he goes, ‘All right, now I know you only said one fight, but I do want to tell you this. They’re going to do a rematch in November, and I want to know, do you want to do two fights? Do the next one with me.’ And I paused and I looked at the check and I said, ‘Yeah, I want to do it because if I can get another check like that, it would be golden.’

Hand said that initial reluctance turned into a job he legitimately loves. And he said the company’s always been a family business.

“Although my mom’s name was never on the business, my mom was a big, big part of the success of the early years of our company, and frankly, even the later years. She just had a big voice in all of it. We truly are a family business. I used to say to my dad if he ever got mad at me and was looking across the desk, I’d go, ‘Hey, look, if you don’t like what you see here, there’s one person you should complain to. It’s you. Because I am what you created.’

For Hand, he’s thrilled to get to keep running this business his father created, and to keep working with family and friends.

“I think at 67 I have one regret and that regret is that I wish I was 47. The business is so much fun.

“It’s amazing that we are going through what we’re going through right now, which is a growth spurt as an industry and as a business. And damn, I just wish I was younger to be able to say I’m going to be around doing it, but I know it’s not going to work out that way.

“But I’ve got a wonderful group of people that are supporting me, people like Chris [DeBlasio, communications consultant] and Tim [McManus, senior director of content and partnerships], and we’ve got nieces and nephews and cousins and a bunch of people working here on our staff of 50 people. And it is just a fun, sexy business to be working in when, in all honesty, you’re the best at it. We are. And it really is fun coming to work every day.”

Remarkably, though, while boxing has been key for JHP over the years, Hand said his interests were in a much different sport to start with. That would be basketball, where he even was a NBA draft pick.

“I had no interest in boxing. I actually was a basketball fan and player. I was lucky enough in 1980 to get drafted by the Philadelphia 76ers in the 10th round. Basketball was my sport and I loved doing it.

“Boxing only came into the Hand family because of my dad’s relationships, born out of investing in Cloverlay. …I think we all grew to become fonder of it as the years went by, because we were in it and we were watching it. And we all loved Joe Frazier and all the opportunities that our relationship with Joe gave us as a family.”

Hand said those early connections with Frazier led to the company being mostly known for boxing at first, but they’ve grown well beyond that. One huge move for them was an early partnership with the UFC.

“People would say, ‘Hey, Joe Hand Promotions, you’re the fight guys.’ And you know what? They were accurate. That’s who we were. Not only for our roots being in the boxing business with the Joe Frazier connection first and then just over the decades of doing all the boxing events, but then in 2001, Dana White and his friends, the Fertitta brothers take over the UFC and we start a relationship there.

“As Dana likes to tell everybody, we’re the longest-tenured vendor that they have in their company. We’ve been there since really the day that he bought the company. And we would love to be there until the day he sells it and goes on his merry way.”

While Joe Hand Promotions is still in the business of distributing content to sports bars and other locations, that business has changed a lot. Hand said the key recent shift there is about streaming-only events.

“I told my dad probably about eight, seven or eight years ago, I said, ‘Dad, I’m going to tell you this streaming phenomenon is going to come and our business is going to get impacted by it.’ If you took a look at the timeline of this company, we were always on the timeline in some kind of change due to technology, whether it was close circuit tv, and then all of a sudden our world changes when DirecTV comes into it and they’re like, ‘Yeah, you can put these little pizza pie dishes on the lens of your apartment and you can bring the signal in.’ You’re going ‘No way. That’s not going to work.’ Yes, it did. And then now we are on the cusp of streaming.”

“I think the one thing I miscalculated in all of that was I thought that streaming was going to change the way we deliver the signal to the bar owners. That’s true. But it’s not happening as fast as it is with the consumer. But the thing that I wasn’t planning on was that streaming was going to create so many new content partners for us.”

Hand said the streaming era’s been a huge boost for his company, expanding their partnerships and what they can offer to their customers.

“I just never knew that we were going to start doing business with DAZN, ESPN+, AEW, Netflix, all these companies that now are like tech companies. And all it’s done is create, for Joe Hand Promotions, a bigger menu of programming to resell to those bars and restaurants, because they want the programming. I mean, ESPN+, the first month that we launched them, when they were in their infancy, I think they had 43,000 unique events in one month. Holy smokes, I’m like, ‘I can’t believe this. We were working fight to fight.’

“UFC fights, we’d have 12 in a year, we’d have four or five or six big boxing events in a year. I mean, it’s incredible the amount of sports that’s out there. And if you’re a sports bar and you have TVs and you want content, boy, it’s pretty sure that now we can deliver it to you.’

And Hand said he thinks there will be demand for watching sports at bars well into the future, citing the way he often goes out with friends to watch Eagles’ games and other sports events.

“I think that there is going to always be that need for a communal experience in Philly,” Hand said. “It’s fun. What can you say that’s not fun about something like that? My wife’s happy because the house doesn’t get all messed up with popcorn all over, with us making loud noise, and she loses part of her house.

“But I think that people just generally love to have that communal experience. And when they do, what we give those bar owners is that unique content that’s not available on every TV station. And that’s what’s going to make them separate themselves competitively from the guy next door.”