By Chris Williams: Top Rank promoter Bob Arum is projecting that the Manny Pacquiao vs. Antonio Margarito bout from last Saturday night will bring in 1.4 million pay-per-view buys, according to the Dallas Morning News. Arum says the Pacquiao-Margarito bout will end up with twice the numbers of the Pacquiao vs. Joshua Clottey fight produced last March. That fight ended up with 700,000 PPV buys, which was a drop off of from the Pacquiao vs. Miguel Cotto bout, which drew 1.2 million buys.

It’s hard to imagine a fight between Pacquiao and Margarito resulting in better numbers than Pacquiao-Cotto, because Margarito doesn’t have a big fan base in the U.S. Of course, this could be wishful thinking on Arum’s part. He’s the one that projected the Pacquiao-Margarito fight would sell more than 60,000 tickets at the Cowboys Stadium. Unfortunately, it only ended up with 41,000, and it’s still unknown how many of them were complimentary give away tickets that artificially boosted the numbers.

1.4 million buys would equal what Floyd Mayweather Jr., boxing’s cash cow, did for his fight against Shane Mosley this year. Those fighters are both stars, but you can’t say the same thing for the Pacquiao-Margarito fight. That was a fight that only had one star and one fighter that was pretty well disliked. I think Arum is likely inflating his numbers by two. My guess is the Pacquiao vs. Margarito fight will draw around 600,000 to possibly 700,000. I just hope there’s some accurate numbers we can trust once they do get announced. I don’t want to see some fake numbers to make the mismatch seem better than it was. I do compare it with the Mayweather-Mosey fight in one area and that’s the way it ended in a mismatch like the Mayweather-Mosley fight.