By Dan Ambrose: According to the Twitter page of Yahoo Sports writer Kevin Iole, he’s hearing from “good sources” that last Saturday’s bout between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Shane Mosley only did between 1.1 and 1.2 million pay per view buys. If this turns out to be the case, this would be a huge disappointment for Mayweather, Mosley and Golden Boy Promotions, especially the CEO of that company Richard Schaefer.
It was Schaefer who had initially predicted that the Mayweather-Mosley fight would bring in 3 million PPV buys. He later changed it to 4 million PPV buys, and some people thought he was delusional with that figure. If it does wind up as only 1.1 or 1.2, it would show how badly off his estimations were for this fight. It did seem strange that for over a month leading up to the Mayweather vs. Mosley fight, there was hardly talk at all about the fight, both in terms of articles on it and in the various popular boxing forums on the internet. That wasn’t a good sign, since the internet chatter – or lack thereof – about particular fights are usually a good sign of whether a fight is going to be successful or a dud in the final PPV numbers.
I never thought this fight was going to be huge. The reason being was that Mosley, as great as he is, never was a huge PPV draw on his own against other fighters not named Oscar De La Hoya. Mosley did well in his fights against De La Hoya, but he failed to bring in the huge numbers in other fights. There was something missing from him. It didn’t help matters that he was beaten twice by both Vernon Forrest and Winky Wright in the prime of his career.
Those defeats really took a lot of the air out of making Mosley a huge PPV attraction, in my estimation. It obviously wasn’t a good idea on his part to fight rematches with both fighters after being soundly beaten in his first fights with them. Nothing much changed in his rematches, and it now seems like a bad decision on his part to fight them again. Mosley still remains as a good fighter, but I think he probably wasn’t as popular enough to bring the PPV numbers into the 2 million range, which has only been accomplished once before with the De La Hoya vs. Mayweather bout.
I knew the Mayweather vs. Mosley fight wasn’t going to be as popular as that fight, because that bout was talked about for months. There was huge excitement about that fight. It didn’t matter that De La Hoya was seen as on the downside of his career, there was still a lot of interest in that fight going into it. In the case of the Mayweather-Mosley fight, a lot of people saw Mosley as too old, not active enough and not a good enough boxer to beat a skilled fighter like Mayweather.
It turned out to be the exact case, as Mayweather totally dominated Mosley, beating him by an easy 12 round decision. But the lack of excitement about the fight going into it was really telling. Mosley didn’t have anything really special about him to grab onto in recent years. He wasn’t knocking everyone out and had suffered a loss to Miguel Cotto in 2007. Mosley beat Ricardo Mayorga recently, but looked in the eyes of some people to be on the verge of losing the bout until scoring a 12th round knockout.
There’s nothing wrong with Mayweather-Mosley generating only 1.1 or 1.2 million PPV buys. Those are respectable numbers, given that there was really only one huge star in that fight – Mayweather. If this ends up being the final numbers, both fighters will still get a huge payday – In Mayweather’s case, over $22 million, and $7 million for Mosley.
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