By Allan Fox: For the many boxing fans who may not have had a chance to see the expensive “Fight of the Century” last Saturday night between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao, they’ll be able to see the replay of the fight tonight, May 9th, on HBO and Showtime.
The fight replay start time is at 9:00 p.m. ET on both Showtime and HBO. The boxing fans will just need to tune into one of these two channels at this time to see last Saturday’s PPV fight.
Many fans chose not to pay to see the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight due to the high cost of purchasing it on PPV, as well as the huge cost of the tickets. Tonight, fans will be able to see it on regular HBO and Showtime without having to pay to see it.
For HBO subscribers, the Mayweather vs. Pacquiao replay will start the broadcast at 9 PM, and will come before the main event fight between Saul “Canelo” Alvarez vs. James Kirkland, which will be taking place from the Minute Maid Park in Houston, Texas. This is part of an HBO World Championship Boxing card. The Canelo-Kirkland fight was supposed to have a co-feature bout between Humberto Soto vs. Frankie Gomez, but that fight has since been canceled after Gomez failed to make weight during last Friday’s weigh-in.
Showtime subscribers will see “Inside Mayweather vs. Pacquiao” after the Mayweather-Pacquiao replay. It will go into the inside the details of the aftermath of their famous fight last Saturday night. It should give viewers a good chance to see what happened after the fight. As we all know, Pacquiao’s promoter Bob Arum revealed at the post-fight press conference that Pacquiao came into the fight with a shoulder injury. Pacquiao has since has shoulder surgery to repair the problem this week and he’s now healing.
Mayweather defeated Pacquiao by a 12 round unanimous decision in a fight that was competitive for the first six rounds. After Mayweather made some adjustments in the second half of the fight, he was able to pull away and dominate the last six rounds. Some boxing fans believe that Mayweather’s success only came from Pacquiao having aggravated his injured shoulder around the 4th round, and from that point on he wasn’t as effective.
Whatever the case, Mayweather clearly controlled the last half of the fight, and was able to keep Pacquiao from landing enough of his solid blows to get the victory. In looking at the difference between the 1st half of the fight and the 2nd half, the only real difference that one could detect is that Mayweather engaged less with Pacquiao in the last six rounds, and used a lot more movement. Even if Pacquiao hadn’t aggravated his right shoulder, he would have still had problems landing anything in the last six rounds due to the constant movement that Mayweather was using to keep him from getting his shots off.
The Mayweather-Pacquiao fight is predicted to break pay-per-view records. Kevin Iole of Yahoo Sports is predicting that the Mayweather vs. Pacquiao PPV numbers will reach a minimum of 5.63 million buys to a max of over 6 million buys. We really can’t know for sure due there being a lot of cable outages on the night of the fight. For my area, the cable was out for the entire fight. This means that people in my area of the U.S were unable to order the fight. If this same problem hit other cable areas in the U.S, then it would suggest that far fewer fans got to see the fight than what Iole is predicting.
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