By Dan Ambrose: With HBO passing on the Miguel Cotto vs. Ricardo Mayorga fight on March 12th, and choosing instead to show the WBC middleweight fight between Sergio Martinez and unbeaten Sergiy Dzinziruk, boxing fans are going to have to choose which fight they want to see, as Bob Arum, the promoter for Cotto, has decided to have the Cotto-Mayorga pay-per-view fight directly compete with the Martinez-Dzinziruk fight instead of wisely choosing to move it to a date that lacked another good fight.

Since the Martinez vs. Dzinziruk bout will be shown on regular HBO and not PPV, Arum may end up shooting himself in the foot by choosing to compete with the Martinez vs. Dzinziruk fight. Arum obviously has the much better card going for him with the Cotto-Mayorga fight card because the card has the following fights: Miguel Vazuez vs. Leonardo zappavigna, Donnie Nietes vs. Raul Garcia, Pawel Wolak vs. Yuri Foreman, Joshua Clottey vs. Calvin Green and Christy Martinez vs. Dakota Stone.

In contrast, the Martinez vs. Dzinziruk fight card has Andy Lee vs. Craig McEwan, and that’s about it. However, with the Martinez-Dzinziruk card, you don’t have to pay extra for it if you have HBO, because it’s not a PPV fight. That really counts for a lot in this economy because there’s not a lot of boxing fans that have money pouring from their backsides ready to dump it on watching Cotto face an older fighter that is long past being relevant. Most boxing fans don’t purchase PPV events for the undercard fights.

They choose it because of the main event, and in the case of Cotto vs. Mayorga, it might be an interesting enough fight for it to have a negative effect on the Martinez vs. Dzinziruk ratings. In the end, I think Arum’s card is going to suffer for him not moving it to another date where there isn’t a decent fight that’s competing with him. This I think is going to hurt Cotto and Mayorga most of all because it will likely mean that they will receive less money because the PPV buys won’t be as much due to fans opting to watch the Martinez vs. Dzinziruk for free rather than giving their money away to see Cotto face an old guy.