By Jason Kim: At a price tag of $50 on Pay-Per-View, this Saturday’s match up between former champions Roy Jones Jr. and Bernard Hopkins could make both fighters a little bit of money after the PPV receipts are tallied. How much money will depend on whether boxing fans are willing to scoop this fight up and order it in droves. I haven’t seen a lot of advertising for this fight on my local cable network, but maybe that’s just where I live.

I have a feeling, though, that this fight might not do very well in terms of generating a lot of PPV buys. Recently, Manny Pacquiao, perhaps the biggest PPV star in boxing at this time, was able to bring in over 700,000 PPV buys fighting an almost totally unknown opponent Joshua Clottey. That fight sold entirely from Pacquiao’s end without any assistance from Clottey. 700,000 are good numbers for a PPV attraction. However, I don’t see this Saturday’s fight between Jones and Hopkins coming anywhere near that total.

It doesn’t matter that the Jones-Hopkins fight on paper appears to be a much more competitive match up compared to the Pacquiao-Clottey fight, which was a horrible mismatch from the moment it was dreamed up by Top Rank promoter Bob Arum. Even if the Jones vs. Hopkins fight is more of a competitive fight on paper, the fans don’t appear to be connecting with this fight for some reason. It isn’t just that the marketing for the fight appears to be badly lacking. I think it’s just hard to identify with two fighters that are over the age 40.

This is perhaps why it’s generally better for a 40-year-old to be matched against a younger guy, because at least there’s some balance, and a reason for younger boxing fans to want to see the fight. You want to match a younger star, someone who the younger fans are looking up to, against an old lion like Hopkins or Jones. When you put too old fighters together like Hopkins and Jones, it’s got to be harder for fans to identify with them.

Older boxing fans might want to see a fight between Jones and Hopkins, but not the younger ones. Neither of these guys have been exactly lighting the world on fire in the past couple of years in taking on top level opponents. Jones, incredibly, has been fighting the better guys, which is kind of strange given that many people feel that Jones is way over the hill at this point.

Jones just hasn’t taken on the fighters that fans really care about like Chad Dawson and Tavoris Cloud. Jones, for good reason, hasn’t fought those two. They would probably decapitate him if given the opportunity. Hopkins has done zero since beating middleweight Kelly Pavlik two years ago. He’s fought once against Enrique Ornelas last December, and won a dull, one-sided fight.

As you can see, Hopkins and Jones haven’t fighting the kinds of opponents that would win over younger fans, and haven’t done much to maintain older fans. Because of that, Jones and Hopkins are rarely mentioned in boxing forums until recently with this fight. And it looks like the boxing public doesn’t really care too much about this fight. Jones has done a good job of giving good interviews in the lead up to the fight, but it’s just not enough to get fans really interested in this fight. My guess is this fight could wind up generating in the neighborhood of 100,000 to 200,000 PPV buys, but no more than that. There’s just no real interest for this fight.