By Chris Williams: Trainer Freddie Roach revealed that one of the deciding factors in 39-year-old Juan Manuel Marquez being selected for Manny Pacquiao’s next fight on December 8th was because of the money that Marquez can bring in with pay per view buys compared to the less popular Tim Bradley.
Roach told RingTV “It [the money] was a huge factor. Bradley doesn’t bring the people that Marquez does. Marquez has the pay per view following, and I think that at their last fight, the Mexican’s outdrew the Filipinos by a large, large margin.”
Someone kept track of this? I do know that there was an incredible amount of booing by the crowd at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada when Pacquiao beat Marquez by a 12 round majority decision by the scores of 115-113, 114-114 and 116-112. I think the booing wasn’t necessarily from just Marquez fans. It looked like boxing fans in general hated the decision because Marquez had clearly controlled the fight and should have been given the decision.
It was a terrible decision that didn’t make Pacquiao look good nor his promoter Bob Arum, because they marched off and then fought Tim Bradley instead of trying to clear up the controversial decision. The logical fight at the time was an immediate rematch with Marquez while the iron was still hot.
Instead, Pacquiao was matched up against Bradley and it’s not surprising that the fight failed to draw big PPV numbers. Arum really blew it by matching Pacquiao up with Bradley. That was about as brilliant an ideas as it was for Arum to match Pacquiao up with another one of his Too Rank stable fighters in Joshua Clottey. The numbers for the Clottey-Pacquiao and Bradley-Pacquiao were the exact same with the Clottey fight bringing in 660,000 PPV buys and the Bradley-Pacquiao fight hauling in 700,000 buys. What Arum should have done was matched Pacquiao back up with Marquez, because the interest was still high in that fight. But now that the fight has cooled off I think Pacquiao-Marquez 4 will be lucky if it draws 1 million PPV buys.
Besides that, the fight is so played out it’s not even funny. Just putting them together because they make money isn’t a good enough reason to make the fight, because it turns off a lot of the hardcore boxing fans who are officially sick of seeing Pacquiao matched against Marquez.
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