By Chris Williams: With only a month to go before the September 19th catch weight clash between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Juan Manuel Marquez, the interest in the fight looks to be very low among boxing fans, even though an effort was made to spruce up the card by adding Zab Judah, Chris John, Michael Katisidis and Vicente Escobedo to the undercard. Those fighters likely won’t do much to get attention from boxing fans in this economy, because none of those boxers are huge stars.
I think if things don’t get better soon in terms of ticket sales the fight organizers need to consider selling the tickets at a discount and cheapening the price for the pay per view. If the tickets don’t start selling better, the organizers might want to consider slashing the price by one half, and then reduce the pay-per-view to a more reasonable $19.95 for the event.
I could see a lot of boxing fans wanting to purchase the fight if it were sold at that price or possibly lower. I don’t know that the fight will sell well at the current price, no matter how many HBO Marquez-Mayweather 24/7 previews they show.
The problem here is that Mayweather is coming off a two year retirement and he’s fighting a smaller opponent than him who isn’t well known to casual fans. Mayweather may be a popular fighter, but I can’t say he’s popular enough to lure boxing fans into paying big money to see him fight a small guy like Marquez. I could see it if this was Miguel Cotto, but for some reason Mayweather wasn’t interested in fighting a legitimate welterweight opponent.
Short of selling the tickets and pay per view at a huge discount, Mayweather may need to consider getting out there on a barnstorming tour of the U.S. to try and get more attention for the fight. That’s probably not going to happen though.
The Marquez-Mayweather bout is already hampered because some wise person made the decision to have the fight take place on the same night as the UFC 103 event. Given a choice between watching an all action event like the UFC 103 with a lot of evenly match fights or the Mayweather vs. Marquez fight, which matches two counter punchers and an undercard that is less than exciting, my guess is that Mayweather-Marquez event will be further hurt.
You knows are bad when you see the Cotto-Pacquiao bout, which doesn’t take place until November 14th, is getting more press than the Marquez-Mayweather bout. That tells you that someone misjudged how popular the Marquez-Mayweather fight was going to end up being. The lack of attention in this fight is startling and I really can’t see that changing no matter how much of an effort that HBO or the fighters put into building it up through artificial means like the 24/7 series.
At the end of the day, you still have Mayweather fighting an opponent who is two divisions smaller than him and not all that popular. Heck, Mayweather might as well chosen a journeyman to fight because the excitement for the event would likely be about the same. This is why they need to consider drastically reducing the cost of this fight and make it more appealing to see.
The undercard does nothing for me and I see nothing but mismatches with Chris John vs. Rocky Juarez, Michael Katsidis vs. Vincente Escobedo and Zab Judah vs. Antonio Diaz. I wouldn’t mind seeing those fights on Friday Night Fights (FNF), but I wouldn’t pay dime to see any of them on pay-per-view, at least not against each other.
I wouldn’t mind seeing John face Juan Manuel Marquez, since John got one of the most controversial wins I’ve ever seen in boxing when he defeated Marquez in a fight that took place in Indonesia. However, that’s not happening. John will be facing Juarez, a B level fighter that John dominated last time out in a fight that ended up a 12 round draw in Juarez’s home town of Houston, Texas.
At the end of the day, I think the Mayweather-Marquez card will do poorly and end up a big disappointment in terms of final pay-per-view box office number, unless they do something now to make the event more appealing by drastically reducing the price. For me, this is a $10 to 19 event, no more than that.
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