Peter Nelson ensuring HBO boxing still packs a powerful punch

Before it decamped to Lisbon, Dublin’s Web Summit was the place to take the temperature of the tech world, a bewildering feast of cutting edge apps and software, high value pitches and, supposedly, multi-million euro deals sealed over a third-wave coffee.

It was also a venue where you could appreciate top-class presentations from a dizzying array of speakers, and few were as impressive as Peter Nelson, vice president of HBO Sport.

Nelson went far beyond the bog-standard PowerPoint to share a powerful mix of striking images — Floyd Patterson featured — and unexpected retro literary references. It was a surprise, for instance, to hear him drop the name of the man who wrote one of the greatest boxing pieces of all time, the sumptuous ‘Ahab and Nemesis’. Mind you, given Nelson was the only man at the entire Web Summit who was able to carry off a pocket square, perhaps a fondness for AJ Leibling shouldn’t have been a surprise.