Jay-Z and his sports management company, Roc Nation Sports, are sued by former featherweight boxer and Roc Nation client Daniel “Twitch” Franco. He says reckless scheduling and inadequate post-fight medical procedures led to catastrophic, career-ending head and brain injuries throughout three fights scheduled over 79 days in 2017. Franco signed with Roc Nation Sports in 2015 and won five contests for the promotion between June 2015 and November 2016.
On March 23, 2017, Franco fought light-punching veteran Christopher Martin in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Times described it as “a tuneup” for Franco, presumably ahead of more prominent and lucrative fights. This is where the management practices of Roc Nation Sports first come into question. According to Al Franco, Daniel’s father and trainer, Daniel had the flu ahead of the bout and had been “out of the gym for three weeks,” and as a result, wanted to cancel or postpone the fight. The lawsuit says Roc Nation pressured Franco into keeping the battle, and instead of tuning up against a cupcake, Franco lost by TKO in the third round.
Just seven weeks after the knockout loss, Franco was back in the ring in Mexico, reportedly at the urging of a Roc Nation Sports matchmaker, who wanted him to “keep busy.” On May 12, Franco beat a tomato can named Francisco Agustin Suarez in Suarez’s second and final professional fight. This was a sufficient warmup to put Franco back in the ring less than one month later, on June 10 in Las Vegas, against Jose Haro. That’s the night that Franco’s career and life went to hell. From the Los Angeles Times report:
That night, surgeons performed emergency brain surgery on Franco, where they discovered “two skull fractures and a separate brain bleed that the surgeon said likely occurred in fights before the loss to Haro.” Doctors removed a section of Franco’s skull, and he spent two weeks in a coma. Now Franco must wear a protective helmet, and his speech is slow and slurred; a doctor reportedly told him he’d “have a tough time” returning to school to complete his education “due to memory deficiencies caused by the injury.”
