Juan Manuel Marquez vs. Tim Bradley on September 14th at the Thomas & Mack Center, Las Vegas, Nevada

By Boxing News - 04/24/2013 - Comments

marquez456By Chris Williams: The proposed fight between WBO welterweight champion Tim Bradley and Juan Manuel Marquez has been confirmed by their promoter Bob Arum, according to Dan Rafael of ESPN. The fight will take place on September 14th at the Thomas & Mack Center, in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The date could change depending on whether Floyd Mayweather Jr. will be fighting on September 14th or not. Arum seems to think Mayweather won’t be, but if he does then Arum will move the Bradley-Marquez fight to October.

Arum said to ESPN: “The fight is agreed to. We have contracts out to both fighters…these guys wanted to fight each other, even though either of them could have opted to fight Manny…Marquez and Bradley is a huge fight, especially with Hispanics, so we’d like to do it on September 14.”

Arum is under the impression that Bradley-Marquez fight will bring between 500,000 to 600,000 PPV buys. I think it’ll do well, but I just don’t know if Marquez can bring in enough fans to make it a really huge fight because I suspect that he won’t get much help from Bradley’s fans because he doesn’t have a big enough fan base.

The PPV results for this fight will be a huge test of how popular Marquez is with his Mexican fan base. My guess is the fight will do 300,000 PPV buys under the best of circumstances depending on what their competition will be on Showtime on the same night.

Marquez turned down a fight with Manny Pacquiao because he wanted an opportunity to win fifth world title, and Pacquiao didn’t have a title for him to accomplish that. Arum still likely could have made the Pacquiao-Marquez fight happen if he had given Marquez a big bump up in pay to take the fight.

Marquez reportedly wanted $20 million to face Pacquiao again, and the only way that Arum could have accomplished that would be for him to give Marquez a 50-50 deal instead of the 76-24 deal that Marquez got last time he fought Pacquiao.

Bradley is coming of a really hard fight in beating Ruslan Provodnikov, and you have to wonder whether Bradley will be up to taking the heavy shots from Marquez without getting badly hurt or knocked out.



Comments are closed.