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He’s trading ringside glamour for frontline danger.
A rising HBO Sports executive has abandoned the Manhattan high life to enlist in the Army — and will land in Afghanistan any day now as just another grunt.
Luis Barragan Ferrer, 39, left his prestigious position as director of sports programming at the network late last year and set out for a Georgia boot camp. Voluntarily.
“I just feel that I owe this country a great deal,” Barragan said by phone as he prepared for deployment in the battle zone. “I never believed that my education or professional success absolved me of a duty to serve.”
HBO Chairman and CEO Bill Nelson, himself a volunteer Vietnam vet who rose to become an entertainment-industry titan, said, “This is the purest enlistment I am aware of.
“The perception is that people join the Army because they are suffering from some form of hardship. But Luis had none of those motivations,” Nelson said.
Influential in HBO’s boxing division, Barragan, a lawyer, chose a two-year departure into peril over his swanky Chelsea condo and regular work assignments in Las Vegas. Leaving behind his fiancée, Eden Gonzales, only made the decision more grueling.
“I had to stop myself from crying when he first told me,” Gonzales said. “I was just worried what might happen. But when you care for someone, you have to let them pursue their goals. He knows I’ll stick by him no matter what.”
Barragan, who went to the University of California at Berkeley and has a law degree from Georgetown, said he simply followed his conscience.
His bewildered bosses thought he was joking when he first told them he was contemplating the move. Some even gently encouraged him to seek out psychiatric assistance.
“I asked him to speak to somebody about it, just so that he could really understand what his motivations were,” acknowledged HBO vice president of programming Kery Davis. “To be honest, I had mixed feelings.”
The boxing world scratched its collective head.
“There was a lot of shock and amazement when Luis made his decision,” legendary boxing promoter Don King told The Post. “To leave what a lot of people would see as a dream job to go fight for the freedom that we enjoy here in America is pretty incredible.”
Retired boxing superstar Oscar De La Hoya added: “Most people do not have the courage and fortitude that Luis has, and he should be commended for this selfless act.”
Whenever doubts crept in, Barragan revisited his motivations and thought about his mom, a single mother of Mexican heritage who raised him and two siblings by herself.
“We are all successes now by any measure,” he said. “That’s definitely a testament to her, but I don’t believe it would have been possible in any other country. I just want to give back now.”
Barragan said he hopes to return to HBO after his tour. Nelson said he would always have a place at the network.