Mayweather, Pacquiao not talking to the media, mainly Roach hyping fight

By Boxing News - 04/13/2015 - Comments

roach5By Allan Fox: After six years of waiting for the mega-fight between Floyd Mayweather Jr and Manny Pacquiao, boxing fans are finally getting the chance to see the fight on May 2nd. However, the fight may ultimately bring in less pay-per-view buys than what some had expected it to do.

The major problem is the lack of interviews that the fighters are giving. The whole build up to the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight is largely being carried on the shoulders of Pacquiao’s trainer Freddie Roach, who seems to have adopted the responsibility of giving pretty much all the interviews. This obviously isn’t a good thing, not if you’re talking about wanting to break PPV records and such. The mega-fight has already been hampered by a lack of a world press tour, which they felt wasn’t needed due to the enormity of the fight. But this could be a situation where they’ve it for granted that the fight would just sell passively without any help in terms of a press tour. The fight also isn’t helped by the lack of a long HBO 24/7 or Showtime All Access series to help publicize it. Like the press tour, it was felt that the episodes weren’t needed. In place of the episodes, there will be one special lasting one hour called “Mayweather/Pacquiao: At last. The special will be televised on HBO on April 18th, and then replayed many times. This is not a great replacement for the HBO 24/7 episodes because there’s nothing new being shown each week. It’ll just be the same one-hour episode. The same with Showtime in televising a one hour special.

The Mayweather-Pacquiao undercard isn’t great thus far, although it still seems to be evolving. As big as the fight is you would assume that there would be some really nice fights on the undercard. Right now there isn’t anything that jumps out at you when you look at the current fights on the card: Vasyl Lomachenko vs. Gamalier Rodriguez, Leo Santa Cruz vs. TBA, Jesse Hart vs. Mike Jimenez, Christopher Pearson vs. Said El Harrak, and Andrew Tabiti vs. TBA. These fights don’t interest me much, but perhaps boxing fans are eager to see them. I would prefer to see guys like Danny Garcia, Lucas Matthysse, Saul “Canelo” Alvarez, Adrien Broner, Miguel Cotto, Gennady Golovkin, Demetrius Andrade, Shawn Porter, Keith Thurman, Brandon Rios, Tim Bradley, Lamont Peterson, Ruslan Provodnikov and Kell Brook.

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With the huge money that is potentially going to be made for the Mayweather vs. Pacquiao fight, it would be nice if a good undercard was included.

According to Fight News, Floyd Mayweather Sr., the trainer for Mayweather, has been asked to hold back on his trash talking. This leaves only Roach to do the trash talking, and he’s now gotten to the point where he’s starting to repeat himself because he’s seemingly run out of things to say due to all the interviews he’s given. It’s a huge responsibility to have Roach as the lead guy in giving the interviews and doing the trash talking.

You’d like to think that the fighters could spend at least one hour a day trying to promote their own fight. It’s up to them. If they want to make huge money on the fight then they absolutely need to work on marketing it by giving interviews. If they’re comfortable with whatever the fight makes then they’re doing the right thing by not giving interviews. But if they’re assuming that the fight will simply make money without interviews, I think they’re going to be sadly mistaken when the final PPV numbers come out. Given the lack of a press tour, a good undercard, HBO/Showtime specials, and interviews from the fighters, I think this fight could wind up really under performing in a major way. There’s so much potential with it to be a huge fight, but it might end up doing numbers way below what they thought it would do when the fight was first signed.

The fight is less than a month away there is no tickets being sold as of yet. Boxing fans just recently found out the cost of the fight for PPV with it going for $89 for standard definition and $99 for high definition. The price has gone up and this could hurt sales. It’s a real gamble to raise the price of the fight because it would seem like the smarter thing to do to keep the price the same in order to sell more PPV buys. Raising the price could scare of boxing fans and anger many of them. Again, it looks like another bad decision like the other ones involved with this fight. The whole promotion of the fight seems to have done in a backwards manner. It’s definitely not the textbook way of making a huge fight that will sell a lot of PPV buys and attract a lot of interest.



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