By Chris Williams: Believe it or not, the Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Juan Manuel Marquez bout last Saturday night could end up coming close to 1 million PPV buys, according to Kevin Iole of Yahoo. Yeah, when pigs fly. I don’t believe it for a second, even if they do come out with an official total that’s in the same ballpark as Kevin’s number.

From what I heard of the fight, it was a total bore, a one-sided fight from start to finish. No one was excited about the fight going into it and there were still tickets available up to the night of the fight. How, then, can the fight turn up with a million PPV buys? That seems like some kind of inflated numbers to try and impress boxing fans into thinking it wasn’t as much of a failure as I think it was.

I think HBO, with its Mayweather-Marquez 24/7 series, did it help the PPV numbers in a major way, but I can’t see it being a fight that would come anywhere close to 1,000,000 PPV buys. I think Kevin is way off on this. I have my estimate based on the formula of how little coverage that the fight got going into the fight.

My estimate for the Mayweather-Marquez fight is 400,000 buys, at the high end. Mayweather dominated the little Marquez by most accounts. I didn’t waste my hard-earned money on this farce, so I didn’t see the bout. But I hear that Mayweather blew it by making the fight look too easy and not taking chances to try and score a knockout.

How come I’m not surprised? I knew Mayweather was going to play the old safety first bit, even though he had essentially a pumped up super featherweight he was in the ring with. That’s the weight class that Marquez fought his entire career until recently moving up to lightweight division last year.

If you were into watching a bigger guy like Mayweather pot shot all night against a slower, shorter and older fighter like Marquez, then you were in bliss. However, if you paid $50 to see a competitive fight, you were sadly disappointed.

When the PPV numbers are eventually released, I won’t believe them if it’s anything above 400,000 buys. This just wasn’t a sale-able fight because of the size disparity between Mayweather and Marquez. Unless I’m the one that actually is privy to that kind of information, I’m not going to believe whatever numbers eventually are released if they’re out of what I expect them to be.

If they say one million buys, I see that as maybe 300,000 and so on and so forth. I hate the idea of the final sales figures being rigged but I personally would have a hard time trusting the final numbers if they come out beyond the expectations for this fight. This fight was a joke from day one and it’s really sad that it was put together in the first place.

If Mayweather wanted a tune-up bout, he should have chosen someone his own size and not a lightweight opponent and then had the bout take place on ESPN or perhaps on the undercard of title event with other fighters. But to have Mayweather with a start from the lighter weight classes was really off putting for me.

Like I said before, who would want to see Wladimir Klitschko fight someone two divisions smaller than him? It might be interesting for the sheer spectacle but having a pumped up light heavyweight like Chad Dawson face Wladimir Klitschko would be a terrible mismatch and I wouldn’t pay for it.

I’m cool with exhibition fights but I don’t want to have to pay $50 to see them happen. And the Mayweather-Marquez undercard wasn’t filled with the kind of big named fighters that would get huge numbers interested in the fight. Katsidis-Escobedo, John-Juarez and Cruz-Lock aren’t the kind of fighters that would bring in huge PPV numbers.