Pacquiao-Bradley 3: press tour next week in Los Angeles & New York

By Boxing News - 01/15/2016 - Comments

pac3333By Chris Williams: Former eight division world champion Manny Pacquiao (57-6-2, 38 KOs) will be starting a brief 2-city tour next week with WBO welterweight champion Tim Bradley (33-1-1, 12 KOs) to promote their April 9 fight on HBO pay-per-view from the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada. Pacquiao and Bradley will be at the Beverly Hills Hotel in California on January 19th. The second and final city of the brief tour will take place on January 21st at Madison Square Garden in New York.

It goes without saying why the promotional tour for the Pacquiao vs. Bradley fight is only going to be just two cities rather than a longer 6 to 11 city tour.

The interest for the fight is minimal at best, and it would arguably be a waste of money to make it a longer tour. The American boxing fans are well aware of the Pacquiao-Bradley match-up, as they’ve seen it twice already. Putting a lot of money into selling the fight a third time is probably not the smartest thing to do, but then again it was clearly a fail in putting the two together once again.

Even if it was a regular fight on HBO, the ratings for the fight would likely be very, very low. But to ask boxing fans to pay to see a needless third fight, it’s just dumb move. It’s very likely Pacquiao’s promoter Bob Arum has worked out the profit angles and likely sees it as a money maker even if only brings in 400,000 pay-per-view buys. Pacquiao-Bradley 1 brought in 700,000 PPV buys on HBO.

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Pacquiao-Bradley 2 brought in 800,000 PPV buys. Arum must be thinking that with the money going up for the Pacquiao vs. Bradley match-up, it could be a money maker still despite the fact that it’s not an interesting fight. Arum will obviously be hoping that there will be enough casual boxing fans that haven’t seen the previous two fights and will want to pay to see the two 5’6” smaller welterweights face each other on April 9.

“We have more than enough time,” Arum said via philstar.com about there being enough time to market the Pacquiao-Bradley 3 fight to get a lot people interested in seeing it.

There’s slightly less than three months to go. That obviously is a lot of time to market a fight. For the fight to be a success, the fans will have to see it as an interesting fight that they feel is worth paying $70 to see on HBO PPV. If HBO and Top Rank dumps a lot of money on marketing the fight, it’s possible that the fight could generate a decent amount of PPV buys. I doubt it though.

I think a lot of boxing fans are still upset with being ripped off on the Pacquiao vs. Floyd Mayweather Jr. fight last May, and they’re probably not going to be too interested in paying to see Pacquiao fight Bradley for a third time. I couldn’t possibly imagine myself wanting to pay to see a third fight between Pacquiao and Bradley. I’ll watch it on replay the following week on regular HBO. However, the casual fans might be interested in the fight if they’ve never seen Pacquiao and Bradley face each other before. If they have, then I doubt they’ll want to pay to see Pacquiao beat Bradley a third time.

You can understand why Arum made the fight though. There’s already a proven track record there that a fight between Pacquiao and Bradley can bring in a good – not great – amount of PPV buys. It won’t be a 1 million buy fight, but there could be enough fans out there that will want to pay to see it to where Top Rank makes some good money.

Pacquiao has been saying that he plans on retiring after the Bradley fight. If that turns out to be true, then this could be the last big money PPV fight for Top Rank for a considerable amount of time. Arum doesn’t have a replacement to take Pacquiao’s place as his gravy train fighter that brings in the cash on PPV. If Arum tries to stick Terence Crawford of Felix Verdejo on pay-per-view in the near future, he’s likely going to wind up with almost zero PPV buys. That’s why it’s important that Arum stocks the Pacquiao-Bradley 3 card with as many bodies as possible so that Top Rank can get one last big payday, because it might be a long, long time before they find another money maker like Pacquiao.

I wouldn’t doubt it if Arum talks Pacquiao out of retiring after the April fight. I think Arum will convince Pacquiao to continue his career long enough for him to fight Crawford and Verdejo, because those guys need a big name like Pacquiao on their resumes to increase their earning power in a hurry. Without Pacquiao, it might take years and year, and I don’t think the 84-year-old Arum has that many years to wait around for those fighters to start bringing in the PPV gold.



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