NEW YORK (AP) – After preliminaries stuffed with enough lawsuits and trash-talk to make Don King proud, the first of TV’s battling boxing series faced its opening round Tuesday.

Fox’s “The Next Great Champ” takes 12 amateur boxers and has them compete for a contract with Oscar De La Hoya’s promotional company and a title fight within the World Boxing Organization.

The series made NBC and producers Mark Burnett and DreamWorks SKG livid. They accused Fox of ripping off its idea for their boxing reality series “The Contender,” which was announced earlier but is not scheduled to air until November.

Burnett and DreamWorks unsuccessfully sought an injunction to keep the Fox show off the air. They had claimed Fox’s series shouldn’t go forward because it violated rules set up for boxing matches by the California Athletic Commission.

In an unusually bitter war of words, NBC executive Jeff Zucker accused Fox of being copycats in an attempt to hurt a rival. Fox also aired, with some success, the series “Trading Spouses” this summer after ABC had announced a similar series, “Wife Swap,” for the fall.

Fox called such allegations outrageous and said it’s typical for different networks to compete with similar ideas.

Even before these battles had simmered down, an independent producer filed a lawsuit last week claiming De La Hoya and his Golden Boy Promotions had gotten their idea from her in a meeting last fall.