By Dan Ambrose: Last months fight between WBO welterweight champion Tim Bradley (31-0, 12 KO’s) and Juan Manuel Marquez (55-7-1, 40 KO’s) reportedly brought in 375,000 pay-per-view buys on HBO, accordding to Kevin Iole of Yahoo.com. The break even point was at 350,000 buys, so the fight actually made a small profit for Top Rank. It was a risky gamble to make a fight like this a PPV bout because neither guy has ever established that they headline a fight and bring in huge numbers without Manny Pacquiao or Floyd Mayweather Jr. facing one of them.
Bradley’s manager Cameron Dunkin told Yahoo “I’m very, very happy with that. Going in, I thought it would do 250, maybe 300. Those wouldn’t have been bad numbers, either. But this is a very solid number.”
I hope this doesn’t mean we’re going to see Bradley with all of his future fights as PPV bouts, even when they’re not involving Pacquiao. I think the only reason the Bradley-Marquez fight did so well was because of the large fan base that Marquez has. He obviously was the draw here for this fight, and if Bradley tries to do his own PPV bout without Marquez or Pacquiao involved, we could see numbers below 200,000.
Bradley defeated Marquez by a 12 round split decision by the scores 115-113, 116-112 and 113-115.
For his next fight, Bradley is hoping to fight Pacquiao if he can get past Brandon Rios on November 23rd in their fight in Macao, China. It’s not decided on Pacquiao’s part who he’ll fight next, but he does want to get back in the ring in February, so that’s not going to leave Bradley a lot of time to get ready if he’s serious about wanting to fight Pacquiao next. If Bradley can’t be ready by that time then we’ll likely see Pacquiao fight Ruslan Provodnikov, unless Top Rank promoter Bob Arum is able to convince Marquez to face Pacquiao for a fifth time. Marquez has seemed disinterested in facing Pacquiao again, because he says he wants to keep the memory of him knocking Pacquiao out fresh in his mind for the rest of his life. If he faces Pacquio again, then it might not going that way again. Marquez could still possibly beat Pacquiao, but it might go to a decision the next time.
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