Does Mayweather need to piggy-back on popular fighters like Hatton and De La Hoya to sell tickets?

By Dave Lahr: Judging by how poorly the ticket sales have gone fore Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Juan Manuel Marquez bout for September 19th, I’m starting to wonder whether Mayweather is in fact a huge pay-per-view attraction. Marquez may not be a big star, but he’s certainly popular enough to create a big PPV gate if he were matched against Oscar De La Hoya or say Ricky Hatton.

Why, then, isn’t Mayweather-Marquez bout selling well? I know the fight has had a lot of effort pumped into it by both HBO and Golden Boy Promotions in the form of the Mayweather-Marquez 24/7 series, as well adding a halfway decent undercard, and the move to sell the fight in theatres.

With all that great effort that’s been put in this card, you would think that it would be the greatest selling pay per view card ever. However, I’m hearing that the MGM Grand, which is where the fight will be taking place this Saturday night, still hasn’t been sold out. That’s not good.

You could try to paint a nice picture and say that most of the revenue for boxing events comes through pay-per-view buys and not the arena. However, the fact that the tickets aren’t being purchased at a high rate seems to suggest that the boxing public, both casual and hardcore fans, don’t see the Mayweather-Marquez bout as something that they urgently want to see.

Could it be the bad economy that is causing boxing fans to stay away from this event or is it something else like, perhaps, the casual fans aren’t too thrilled at seeing Mayweather fight? In the past, Mayweather has had huge mega fights with Ricky Hatton and Oscar De La Hoya, both big super stars. Was it because of Hatton and De La Hoya that the fights sold well and not because of Mayweather?

Before his fights with Hatton and De La Hoya, Mayweather wasn’t selling a ton of pay-per-view buys. He only started selling really well when Mayweather was matched against Hatton and De La Hoya. Now that Mayweather has gone back to fighting smaller named fighters, his numbers have dropped off again.

It may be that fans just don’t like the way that Mayweather fights and are only interested in seeing him fight when he takes on a bigger star in the sport, De La Hoya, Hatton or perhaps Manny Pacquiao. That would make a lot of sense because Mayweather is a technician rather than a slugger.

His fights are often more frustrating to watch than entertaining because he moves so much, tries to avoid getting hit and throws a lot of pot shots. For this day and age with all the alternatives that the average person has with cable television, it seems like a bad bargain to watch a fighter that doesn’t entertain.

Maybe for some, Mayweather is considered entertaining, but for a whole lot of other boxing fans, they see him as boring to watch. This could be why it sometimes takes a star to be put in with Mayweather before he can sell a lot of tickets.

At 32, it’s doubtful that Mayweather will get much more popular than he is now unless he changes his fighting style in a drastic manner and becomes more of a offense-minded fighter. Given that Mayweather doesn’t like to get hit, I can’t see that happening.

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