Pacquiao-Mosley brings in 1.3 million buys

By Boxing News - 06/10/2011 - Comments

Image: Pacquiao-Mosley brings in 1.3 million buysBy Chris Williams: For what it’s worth, Manny Pacquiao’s May 7th mismatch against aging 39-year-old Shane Mosley brought in 1.3 million buys on pay per view, making it Pacquiao’s biggest PPV bout ever. This is the kind of blather that only hardcore boxing fans really care about, and even then, many of them are bored about this kind of junk. The 1.3 million buys went past the 1.25 million that Pacquiao got for beating up a shot Oscar De La Hoya in 2008. However, it’s less than the 1.4 million that Floyd Mayweather Jr. took in for his fight against Mosley last year in May.

You would think that with all the advertising of the Pacquiao-Mosley fight on CBS, a non-pay per view channel in the form of the Fight Camp 360 Pacquiao-Mosley episodes that it would out-do the Mayweather vs. Mosley fight numbers, which didn’t have the same benefit of being advertised on CBS. But even with that advertising, the fight still came up less than Mayweather-Mosley.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with 1.3 million buys. Those are great numbers, but the fight stunk to the high heavens and it’s not surprising either. Mosley had looked totally shot for his past two fights before the Pacquiao fight and it’s very odd that Mosley, looking as bad as he’d been looking, was selected to fight Pacquiao. He was picked for name value but it was a bad, bad product for casual and hardcore boxing fans to watch – and pay for – because of how much of a mismatch it turned out to be.

You have to wonder how many of those same 1.3 million fans will bother to purchase Pacquiao’s next fight against soon to be 38-year-old Juan Manuel Marquez on November 12th. Besides the age going against Marquez, he’s also having to move up in weight to fight Pacquiao at 144 lbs rather than the two fighters meeting at a half way such as 141.

It’s unknown whether the Pacquiao-Marquez fight will be shown on Showtime or HBO. Bob Arum, the promoter for Pacquiao, is looking into finding one of the two television networks to show it on. There’s still a lot of time before the fight, so we should find out shortly. In the meantime, Marquez is fighting a stay busy fight against little known super featherweight Likar Ramos on July 16th. Other than Ramos being a southpaw like Pacquiao, he has nothing in common with Pacquiao and it’s pretty much a waste of a fight.

Marquez will be fighting at welterweight for the Pacquiao fight, and it’s hard to imagine what he’s thinking by picking a super featherweight like Ramos to instead of at least a light welterweight. I see it as a payday fight for Marquez, because fighting a smaller guy like Ramos won’t help him one bit against Pacquiao. It might actually hurt Marquez because he could get cut and that would postpone his fight with Pacquiao. It also won’t help beating up on a small guy without the same kind of fighting style and/or size as Pacquiao.



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