By Matt Stein: Manny Pacquiao says he really wants to fight Floyd Mayweather Jr., and yet his next opponent, the recently disgraced Antonio Margarito, may not generate enough pay per view buys to make it possible for Pacquiao’s promoter Bob Arum to successfully negotiate a fight with Mayweather. You have to think that Pacquiao-Margarito has to generate at least 1 million PPV buys for Pacquiao to have a decent chance of having a fight put together with Mayweather. Pacquiao would have a great chance no matter how long his PPV numbers are for the Margarito fight if he were willing to accept less than a 50-50 deal with Mayweather. But Pacquiao wants to get equal terms with Mayweather and that’s hard to argue for when Pacquiao is coming up with only 700,000 for his recent fight against Joshua Clottey compared to Mayweather’s 1.4 million PPV buys against Shane Mosley last May.
Pacquiao will a second chance to do better with the Margarito fight, and HBO is even going to help Pacquiao’s cause by putting together a four part Pacquiao-Margarito 24/7 series to help encourage boxing fans to purchase the fight on PPV. You have to wonder whether HBO is doing this with the long term plans of having this fight do well and that helping Pacquiao negotiate a fight with Mayweather. Because the Margarito vs. Pacquiao fight seems like an awful idea for a 24/7 series because Pacquiao can barely speak English at all, and Margarito speaks only Spanish. It’s going to be strange to have an interpreter doing a lot of the speaking for Margarito and having to read a lot of sub titles.
HBO has to be angling to try and help Pacquiao get some decent PPV buys, because this seems like an awful choice for an HBO 24/7 series. Pacquiao’s promoter Bob Arum really isn’t helping Pacquiao’s case by choosing Margarito to fight Pacquiao rather than directing him outside of his own stable to more popular fighters like Sergio Martinez, Paul Williams, or Andre Berto. Those would be great fights. A bout against Margarito won’t be.
One school of thought is that if a bout against the obscure Top Rank fighter Clottey was able to bring in 700,000, then a fight against Margarito should be able to bring in another three hundred thousand because of his Hispanic fan base. However, it’s hard to guess whether they’ll back him in big enough numbers to surpass the Pacquiao-Clottey numbers of 700,000. Margarito has never been a PPV attraction. His fight against Cotto in 2008 drew 450,000 buys, but you can argue that most of those buys came because of Cotto, not Margarito. And since then, Margarito was stopped in the 9th round by Shane Mosley last year, and suspended for a year for having a plaster like substance found in his hand wraps before that fight. The year off from boxing didn’t help Margarito’s popularity and his win over little known Roberto Garcia last May didn’t bring in good PPV numbers either.
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