Top Rank Sues Al Haymon For $100 Million

Top Rank, Inc., one of the nation's premier boxing promotion company, today filed a federal antitrust lawsuit seeking more than $100 million in damages against Al Haymon and the investment firm Waddell & Reed.

"Defendant Alan “Al” Haymon, a former music mogul turned boxing manager, is “the fight game’s biggest mystery.” Operating in the shadows, he has

no website, avoids being photographed, and famously runs his empire from an old school flip phone. For years, Haymon refused to acknowledge that he even had an office. Now, armed with nearly half a billion dollars from a Kansas City-based investment fund, Haymon and Defendant Waddell & Reed are “making a play to take over boxing”2—law, fair competition, and fighters’ rights be damned. Widely regarded as “boxing’s most powerful figure,”3 Haymon brazenly claims that he “could run boxing.”4 He and Waddell & Reed will stop at nothing to get there. But just as there are rules inside the ring, there are extensive regulations outside of it to ensure fair competition—the Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act, the Sherman Antitrust Act, unfair competition laws, and otherstandards and restrictions. If any one person breaks those rules, then everybody loses—the boxers, their managers, the promoters, and, of course, the fans themselves. With the financial backing, complicity, and material assistance of Waddell & Reed and other financiers, Haymon is rigging the boxing industry so they can act as manager, promoter, sponsor, and ticket broker for nearly every major professional boxer competing in the United States, all in violation of the Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act, the Sherman Act, and a host of other state and federal laws. Openly defying the statutorily-mandated “firewall” between manager and promoter—two distinct professional roles that, as described at length below, serve fundamentally different purposes in the boxing industry—Haymon has leveraged his dominance in the boxing management business to injure and exclude competitors in the business of promoting professional boxing matches in the United States."