By Chris Williams: In what has to be seen as a bad indication of how they perceived the November 22nd fight between Manny Pacquiao and Chris Algieri, HBO will be televising just one Pacquiao/Algieri 24/7 episode instead of multiple ones like we’ve seen with many of Pacquiao’s other boxing fights.
The Pacquiao/Algieri 24/7 episode will be televised on November 8th at 1:00 a.m. (ET/PT on HBO after the Bernard Hopkins vs. Sergey Kovalev fight on Championship Boxing from the Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The bad news is that if the Pacquiao-Algieri fight does poorly on PPV like some boxing writers think it will then Pacquiao will lose pretty much all the bargaining power that he ever had with Floyd Mayweather Jr. If Pacquiao-Algieri brings in only 400,000 PPV buys or less, Pacquiao would be lucky to get a 70/30 purse split for a Mayweather fight, and I doubt Pacquiao would ever accept that offer.
Boxing fans will have to be satisfied with seeing just one 30-minute episode of the Pacquiao-Algieri 24/7, because that’s all HBO is going to be putting out for this fight. This is obviously going to hurt the chances of the Pacquiao vs. Algieri fight bringing in a reasonable number of pay-per-view buys on HBO, because the 24/7 episodes was one way for Algieri to introduce himself to the casual boxing fans, many of which have never seen or heard him before.
Algieri himself said that during the run up to the fight that fans would get to know him more due to the media coverage. But with HBO just going to for one Pacquiao/Algeri 24/7 episode, it’s going to make it very, very tough for Top Rank to get the casual fans excited about the fight.
Algieri hasn’t helped matters any by playing mister nice guy during interviews and on the press tour. If he had talked trash about Pacquiao, he’d have helped his own cause by getting boxing fans excited about the fight. But Algieri has come across as more of college professor when giving interviews than a charismatic trash talker that he needed to be for him to help make the Pacquiao-Algieri fight a success.
You can only wonder what 4 or 5 episodes of Pacquiao/Algieri would have been like on HBO 24/7. With neither fighter having anything bad to say about each other, and with one of the only interesting people now gone from Pacquiao’s camp in Alex Ariza, boxing fans would likely have to be content with watching Pacquiao’s trainer Freddie Roach brag and make bold predictions for 30 minutes of every episode. That obviously wouldn’t have worked.
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