Pacquiao to start training following his 2-city media tour next week

By Boxing News - 02/02/2014 - Comments

pac755By Chris Williams: This week, Manny Pacquiao (55-5-2, 38 KO’s) and WBO welterweight champion Tim Bradley (31-0, 12 KO’s) will be taking part in a 2-city media tour to attract interest in their April 12th rematch at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada. Pacquiao plans on immediately starting his training camp after he concludes the media tour. On Tuesday, Pacquiao and Bradley will be in Los Angeles, California in the first city of the tour. On February 5th, they’ll travel to New York to conclude the tour.

It looks like Top Rank promoter Bob Arum is being minimal about the media tours by choosing to travel to just 2 cities in the United States. In contrast, the Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Saul “Canelo” Alvarez traveled to 11 cities as part of their media tour to market their fight last September.

It looks like Arum doesn’t feel that Pacquiao and Bradley need to go to a lot of cities in the United States in order to interest boxing fans in their rematch. Arum could be making a mistake by not following the Mayweather approach to marketing a fight.

If anything, the Pacquiao-Bradley II rematch needs a huge media tour if Arum wants to get boxing fans properly interested in seeing this fight, because as it is, it’s not a great fight. And the undercard for the Pacquiao-Bradley II fight is lacking to say the least with the following fights being the three television bouts on the HBO pay-per-view card:

Raymundo Beltran vs. Roman Martinez

Bryan Vasquez vs. Jose Felix Jr

Khabib Allakhverdiev vs. Jessie Vargas

What Arum needs to do is have Pacquiao and Bradley hit at least 10 cities during a huge tour, and then Arum needs to put some effort into building a good undercard by adding the following fights to the card:

Brandon Rios vs. Ruslan Provodnikov

Mike Alvarado vs. Juan Manuel Marquez

Mikey Garcia vs. Yuriorkis Gamboa

Vasyl Lomachenko vs. Orlando Salido

Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. vs. Carl Froch

Guillermo Rigondeaux vs. Carl Frampton

Now that’s the kind of undercard that the Pacquiao-Bradley II fight would need for it to bring in over 1 million buys. Without a good undercard and a long 10-city media tour, I see the Pacquiao vs. Bradley II fight card bringing in around 400,000 PPV buys, possibly a little more. The fight is basically a rerun of a program that boxing fans didn’t like the first time around. If Arum knew anything about TV programming, he’d know that viewers don’t like to see the same program a second time when they didn’t like it the first time. That’s why Arum needs to dress up this horrible fight by advertising it to the hilt, add a great undercard, and get Pacquiao and Bradley to show a little more life when they go about their paces during the Pacquiao-Bradley II 24/7 series on HBO. Having Pacquiao play his guitar, sing his songs, and put fans asleep won’t do it. Arum needs to get HBO to bring some un-reality to the reality television by staging some conflicts between Pacquiao and Bradley to draw some interest in this fight, because believe me, it’s not interesting. I still remember how boring their 24/7 series was last time on HBO, with Bradley scowling a lot, and talking about how tough he had it growing up in Palm Springs, and Pacquiao looking half asleep during the episodes.



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