By Dan Ambrose: 37-year-old Manny Pacquiao saw his contract with sporting company Nike terminated on Wednesday due to some homophobic remarks he had recently made. Pacquiao apologized for the comments, but it wasn’t enough to prevent him from losing his contract with Nike.
Now the question is will the backlash from this incident hurt Pacquiao’s April 9 fight against Tim Bradley on HBO pay-per-view? This is the last thing that Pacquiao, Bradley, and their promoters at Top Rank needed right now. The fans are already showing scant interest in the fight, which will be the third time they face each other.
If it wasn’t already clear before, it seems now that Top Rank promoter Bob Arum made a mistake by matching Pacquiao and Bradley against each other yet again. You can make an argument that Arum matched them up one time too many at this point, and the PPV sales might be terribly underwhelming, especially with this controversy following Pacquiao from his recent homophobic remarks.
Pacquiao is running for a seat in the senate in the Philippines in the May election in his country. It’s unknown how Pacquiao’s comments about gays will be received from the voters. The timing of this incident is not good for Pacquiao.
“The only way you do damage control is he apologized and we move away from the possibility that anybody would think we or Bradley or anyone connected to the fight believes in what he did say,” Arum said via RingTV.com. “And if (Pacquiao) believes it, it’s unfortunate but that’s his belief. You can’t really affect somebody who is saying things that you don’t believe in but is part of their religious beliefs.”
Arum might want to think about doing some more marketing of the fight if he wants to interest the casual boxing fans in seeing the fight. The fight is old and played out, and it just a really stale idea to put them back in with each other. But now that the decision was made to match Pacquiao against Bradley instead of some new blood, Arum should think about having the two fighters travel to different cities for a tour to get fans interested in the fight.
I don’t think it’s going to be enough to have HBO 24/7, because it’s too old of a fight. HBO 24/7 works when it’s a fresh match-up of guys that haven’t fought each other before, and who the boxing public are interested in seeing. Pacquiao-Bradley 3 is not an interesting fight and it reeks of bumbling and non-thinking on the part of the organizers of this tired old fight.
“I have no idea,” Arum said of the PPV numbers. “I mean we live in a country — look at the number of people who support Donald Trump and the (expletive) that he says. Who knows anymore? How can you make a prediction (on the PPVs)?”
It’s unknown what Arum was hoping for in terms of PPV buys for the Pacquiao-Bradley 3 fight. If he had low expectations for 300,000 buys, then perhaps he’ll be pleased if that many are generated. But if he thought the fight was going to bring in 800,000 PPV buys that the second fight between Pacquiao and Bradley brought in for their April 2014 fight, then Arum might be very unhappy if the numbers are considerably lower.
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