By Chris Williams: Manny Pacquiao’s promoter Bob Arum feels that boxing fans really don’t care about most of the undercard fights. Arum feels that fans mainly care about the main event fights on pay-per-view cards. I guess that explains why Pacquiao’s undercard for his rematch against Tim Bradley is so empty of big name fighters and interesting fights. It’s subjective, of course. Some fans might see the fighters that Arum has stacked the Pacquiao-Bradley II undercard with at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada, as being great fights that they just can’t wait to see.
I don’t have any interest at all in seeing any of the fights that Arum included the Pacquiao-Bradley II rematch, and I think this is one re-tread match-up that Arum badly needed to include a great undercard for because it’s not really an interesting fight. It’s a rematch to fix previous fight where the judges gave the wrong guy the decision in giving Bradley the victory. That was a tainted fight if I ever saw one, and now Arum is asking boxing fans to pay to see a rematch between Pacquiao and Bradley, albeit with an undercard that looks to me to be bargain basement variety.
“The truth is, and I’ve been doing this a long, long time, 90 percent of the people don’t want to see the undercard and don’t care about it,” Arum said to Yahoo Sports. “People are eating, talking to each other, having a drink, having fun, and they don’t give a [expletive] about the undercard. Even in the arena, you’re lucky to get the people in there for the semi-main.”
I don’t agree with any of what Arum’s saying, and I think it’s off-putting. I just wonder if this was the only way to make the numbers work for the rematch. Pacquiao is making over $20 million, and Bradley $6 million. With both fighters making a huge amount of money, I wonder if there wasn’t much money left over to put together any kind of an undercard for the fight. Arum is doing a good job of explaining away why fans don’t care about undercards here, but I have a feeling that there might not have been money left over for the undercard given Pacquiao’s deteriorating PPV numbers from his last fight against Brandon Rios last November.
That was a fight card that had a weak undercard as well, and with the weak main event, the card really needed a strong undercard to attract fans. Unfortunately, Arum didn’t include a great undercard and the results were a disaster with the fight card drawing only 475,000 PPV buys. Now Arum is putting another weak undercard with Pacquiao’s next fight against Bradley, and this is a fight that really needs a strong undercard. When you’re talking about Pacquiao fighting yet another re-tread opponent, I think Arum needs to give fans a great undercard to make up for the fact that he’s not giving them anything new in terms of a different opponent. Putting Pacquiao in with the same fighters over and over, and asking fans to purchase it, I think it’s starting to hurt Pacquiao in terms of his PPV numbers plummeting. I feel that trend will continue on April 12th with the Pacquiao-Bradley fight card bringing in 400,000 PPV buys.
Here’s what fans will be seeing on Pacquiao-Bradley II PPV undercard on April 12th on HBO:
Khabib Allakhverdiev vs. Jesse Vargas
Bryan Vasquez vs. Jose Felix Jr.
Raymundo Beltran vs. Roman Martinez
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