WBC Profiles: Karl Fowler – OPUS CEO

Karl Fowler is a long time  collector of first-edition books and photography enthusiast.

He created Opus Media Group PLC in 2007 after thinking of the brilliant idea about creating a vast, beautifully produced volumes viz high-profile subjects, ranging from sports to people and places.

So far, there have been various amazing Opus editions including Ferrari, Michael Jackson, NFL Superbowls and many more.

 The great Opus is a project from an association with the World Boxing Council and a panel of legendary champions.

 An epic book of leviathan proportions, the WBC Greatest Fights Opus, which describes and depicts the greatest one hundred fights in World Boxing Council´s history was created.

This exclusive Opus – WBC book measures almost 1 meter wide when open and weighs almost 34 kilos. In this special edition, award-winning sports writer Ian Stafford, tells the story of the greatest WBC fights throughout history, with the fights selected for inclusion in the book chosen by the WBC world champions themselves.

 Last week, we had the chance to talk a little with Karl during the books presentation in the beautiful Soumaya Museum of Mexico City.

About the Greatest Fights

“It is difficult because each fight was chosen for different reasons. For me, the trilogy between Fury and Wilder. It just had everything. Also for a photographic point of view, which we always have a key eye on, the imagery just jumps off the page. The ante was being upped every time.

“Hopefully we´ve tried to do justice to the fights and the fighters. The starting premise is that we can debate until the cows come home. People in bars, coffee shops and on the factory floor, but it`s only those who’ve been in the ring, who have earned the right to have that ultimate opinion. We got together with the champions to choose the top twelve, something that had never been done before in boxing.

You get the champions together and get them to decide through argument and debate and conjecture to not only decide, but to rank the top twelve. That is the surprise element we hope people will see when they look through the book.”

So, is it possible to go even bigger?

“There is one reason we couldn´t take this heavier and include more fights because that is the maximum, because we hand bind these. There may be a second edition, but we have to see what the public opinion on this is and to see how it goes down.

“We´ve released a paperback where we are publishing the fight stories, without the imagery. One of the things we wanted to do is to make it as accessible as possible. We are also placing a number of copies into key libraries in cities around the world. So people can view the great photography, a minimum of fifty percent has never been published before. We can´t change history, but what we can do is telling it in a different way. Hopefully, we´ve done justice to the fights and the fighters.”

Karl said it was permissible for the champions to choose their own fights as the greatest, because they had free rein over their reign: “But the irony was that with the champions who were most outspoken, it wasn´t about them and their fights, it was others in different eras and at different weights. We always knew at the start, if we took those twenty champions outside and asked them to look in the sky, we would get twenty shades of blue. It´s in their DNA.”