By Eric Thomas: The September 8th card headlined by Lucas Matthysse (32-2, 30 KO’s) and Olusegun Ajose (30-1, 14 KO’s) reportedly sold only 377 tickets with a $65,657 gate, according to Dan Rafael. The fight took place at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino, in Las Vegas, Nevada. Rafael states that Golden Boy Promotions gave away 810 tickets for the fight. That’s not good.

It’s really not all that surprising that this fight card failed in a major way because neither Matthysse nor Ajose are huge names and the undercard was completely lacking in big named fighters.

Here’s the undercard fights:

Ishe Smith vs.Irving Garcia
J’Leon Love vs. Ramon Valenzuela Jr
Daquan Arnett vs. Jesus Tavera
Melinda Cooper vs. Celina Salazar

Golden Boy should have saw this coming when they put this card together because Matthysse, as good as he is, still needs to make a name for himself in the United States and they were asking for trouble by putting him in the main event against an obscure fighter like Ajose instead of someone well known.

There’s not a lot of guys that Golden Boy could have put Matthysse with that would have sold tickets. I doubt that a Matthysse vs. Amir Khan fight would do well in Las Vegas either, because hasn’t proven that he can sell tickets yet in America. Matthysse needed someone like Zab Judah or Brandon Rios to move tickets, and those guys aren’t easy to land a fight with.

The original numbers for the Ajose-Matthysse fight were 2,439 tickets sold with a gate of $209,175, Dan Rafael states. However, he says that there was a “clerical error’ in the reporting of those numbers. It was then revised with the much lower numbers of 377 tickets sold and a gate of $65,657.

If Golden Boy is going to be putting Matthysse in main events, they’re going to have to at least make sure the undercard fights are ones that will interest boxing fans from around the Las Vegas area if they’re intent on putting his future fights in that city. The guy is from Argentina and he obviously don’t have a lot of fans in the U.S yet.