HBO’s 24/7 Pacquiao/Margarito goes head to head with Showtime’s Fight Camp 360º this Saturday

By Dave Lahr: This Saturday night doesn’t have anything really interesting in terms of huge fights on television. There’s a couple of small decent fights like Sebastian Sylvester vs. Mahir Oral but not much more than that to get interested in. But Showtime and HBO will be competing against either other with the HBO’s 24/7 Pacquiao/Margarito going head to head with Showtime’s Fight Camp 360º at roughly the same time on Saturday night. The HBO 24/7 Pacquiao/Margarito episode 2 will start at 10:30 p.m. ET/PT, while the Super Six tournament documentary by Showtime called Fight Camp 360º will be shown on 10:45 p.m. ET.

I already saw episode 1 of the HBO 24/7 Pacquiao/Margarito series and I found it painfully boring and poorly put together. Whoever the producer of episode is, he appears to have a deaf ear to the kinds of things that the average boxing fans want to see in a series. There was so much wasted video in the 1st 24/7 Pacquiao/Margarito last week. I seriously couldn’t put together a worse episode if I tried.

The 24/7 Pacqiao/Margarito series is being put together to try and sell the fight on pay per view, yet they went on and on and on about the Margarito hand wrap issue for much of the boring first episode. It had me turned off towards the fight. That’s like having series on a mistake made by a president on the eve of a big election. Why on earth did HBO drone on about this topic for so long? I think they did a good job of turning me off with it, and I don’t think it was fair to Margarito. If they want to air dirty laundry, they needed to balance it out with some things about Pacquiao rather than covering Margarito’s mistakes so much in depth. Other than that, neither Margarito and Pacquiao did a good job of selling the fight.

They need to take lessons from professional wrestling and take up some acting classes so that they can understand how to build drama and hype for a fight. Listening to Margarito and Pacquiao talk was incredibly boring, because neither of them seemed to have much intensity or anger. I wanted to see some flames coming out of their nostrils to get me interested in this fight, but instead they were like two guys sitting in a church. If I was their promoter, I would have had them locked and programmed what to do for this documentary. They need to get better at building an image and I think they both need to take some lessons from professional wrestlers how to act.

The Fight Camp 360º has been a lot better as far as I’m concerned. It may not have as much pretty camera views of different cities, but it’s so much better because of the different personalities. But also it’s the person holding the camera and producer of the series that makes it work so well. He’s not wasting time interviewing trainers 24/7. I’m am so bored with listening to Freddie Roach opening and closing his yap about how Pacquiao is going to beat Margarito. Fight Camp 360º does a good job of digging deeper into the private lives of the fighters, showing before, during and after fight footage. I think that’s a smart thing to do. The fighters involved may not be skilled actors but thus far they’ve shown a lot more physical presence than what I’ve seen of the wooden Pacquiao and the constantly smiling Margarito.

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