By Thomas Gerbasi

Only Adrien Broner can pay a compliment to an opponent and have it come out like an insult.

“John Molina Jr. is a true warrior,” Broner said of the man he will face Saturday night in Las Vegas. “His nickname suits him. He's like a punching bag that can hit back with power.”

Yet even when he calls his foe a punching bag, it almost makes you smile because Broner has that ability to do so. When he’s not being obnoxious, he can be witty. When he’s not making cringe-worthy posts on social media, he can be funny.

Of course, thus far for the Cincinnati native, the bad has outweighed the good. Not in the ring, where “The Problem” has held world title belts in three divisions while racing out to a 29-1 with 1 no contest record. On fight night, with the exception of his 2013 loss to Marcos Maidana, he has been nearly flawless. And all at just 25 years old.

But outside the ring, Broner has been more hated than loved, more ridiculed for being Floyd Mayweather lite and not his own fighter. Some of his antics can be chalked up to being a young man with a bigger bank account than other young men, but others just make you wonder if his maturity will ever catch up to his age.

To call him damaged goods in terms of public perception would be inaccurate, but he may have picked up a scarlet letter from the hardcore followers of the sport, something that means nothing on Saturday night, when those outside of the insular boxing world get a dose of Broner thanks to the debut of the Premier Boxing Champions promotion on NBC.

NBC. Prime time. Game changer. Broner has to know it too, even if he won’t say as much.

“I really don't care what station it's on long as people can see us fight and, obviously, there's going to be a lot more people seeing us fight,” he said. “I'm just ready to put on a show.”

It may be his most important yet, bigger than his title fights and premium cable headliners, simply because those fights were the ones that should have made him a mainstream star, but didn’t. Some of that was self-inflicted, as he lost to Maidana and ran out of the ring before a post-fight interview and struggled against Paulie Malignaggi in a fight that was overshadowed by some tasteless pre-fight trash talk. But the rest could be chalked up to the boxing model before the recent Al Haymon-takeover.

Without network television, there are too many moving parts to bring a boxer to the mainstream in the United States. For every Mayweather or Manny Pacquiao that transcends the ring, there is an endless string of talented and charismatic fighters that fall by the wayside. A lot of it has to do with a mainstream media that doesn’t cover the sport like it used to, something that could change if Friday and Saturday nights mean high-quality fights between athletes that are thrust into the public eye in the weeks and months leading up to their bouts.

If you go back to the 80s, fighters like Sugar Ray Leonard, Thomas Hearns, Marvin Hagler, Alexis Arguello, Aaron Pryor, and Ray Mancini were household names, and not just because of their fighting styles, but because people connected with them.

On Saturday night, expect to hear Adrien Broner’s story, how he came up the hard way in a city that produced legends like Ezzard Charles and Pryor, as well as cautionary tales like Ricardo Williams Jr. In the boxing world, we’ve heard it all before, but now those without premium cable or folks simply channel surfing will hear it. And maybe they’ll be intrigued, maybe they’ll keep watching, and maybe they’ll watch the next time Broner steps through the ropes.

For his part, Broner may not revamp his personality, but perhaps he’ll tone it down a bit, something that won’t just aid his career, but set an example for his newly-born son. If he does, he has the talent, youth and personality to become the star he was always expected to be. The hardcore boxing crowd may not buy it, and they probably never will, but we don’t matter anymore. Haymon and company are controlling the narrative now, and they’re aiming right past the hardcore.

This is a lot bigger, and Broner will at least admit that.

“This is a huge deal,” he said. “This is our chance to get the attention of a whole new crowd of people. This is going to make boxing bigger than ever.”

And that’s a good “Problem” to have.