By Dan Ambrose: Manny Pacquiao’s 83-year-old promoter Bob Arum, who has been around in the boxing business for the past 49 years, doesn’t think that Pacquiao’s fight against Floyd Mayweather Jr. this Saturday night is the biggest fight in the history of boxing.
Despite the Mayweather-Pacquiao clash being on the verge of breaking pay-per-view records for the most amount of buys in history and the most revenue generated for a fight, Arum feels that the 1971 fight between heavyweights Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali might have been the biggest.
The only problem is that they didn’t have a pay-per-view system geared up back then other than closed circuit television in order to monetize the fight. Had cable TV been working back then, the Ali-Frazier I fight would have brought in huge numbers. Of course, they wouldn’t have been able to charge the boxing fans the kind of money that they’re charging them for this fight with fans being asked to fork out $89.95 to $99.95 to see the Mayweather-Pacquiao broadcast.
“We didn’t have pay-per-view back then, but imagine the numbers if we did,” Arum said via Dan Rafael of ESPN.com. “There was no social media back then, but imagine if there was. So I don’t think you can really compare this fight with those fights. But for today, this is the biggest thing we’ve had in a long, long time. It blows De La Hoya-Mayweather away and Mike Tyson-Evander Holyfield and Lennox Lewis-Tyson.”
We’ll never know for sure how much money Ali’s fight with Frazier could have made in 1971. Besides the Frazier fight, Ali had huge fights against George Foreman, Ken Norton, as well as his rematches against Frazier. Those all would have been huge fights. Further, Ali’s two fights against Sonny Liston and his fight against Floyd Patterson were also big deals in the early to mid-60s.
It would have been interesting to see how much money those fights would have generated had they had a way of monetizing the fights though pay-per-view. Needless to say, Ali would have been a much more wealthy man than he is today with PPV back in his age.
“If you don’t have the means of transmission, you can’t compare the fights,” Arum said. “When Ali and Frazier fought, we sent the signal on telephone lines, and we could only reach less than 400 [closed circuit] locations…If we had enough, just imagine what some of those fights would have [generated]. So this is a huge, huge fight, but I don’t think you can compare with some of the huge fights from other eras.”
It’s too bad that the money wasn’t made from those fights because there so much potential there. They were sitting on the equivalent of a huge oil well without the ability to extract the oil from the ground until recent times.
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