By Chris Williams: The tickets are literally selling like hot cakes for the December 8th showdown between Manny Pacquiao and Juan Manuel Marquez for their fight at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada, according to Bob Arum of Top Rank. An incredible 13,000 tickets were supposedly sold this past weekend for the mega fight on HBO pay per view.

How many of those tickets were actually sold and how many were complimentary is unclear, but supposedly 13,000 were sold. I guess we won’t know for sure until after the fight and maybe not even then. We’re still not sure what the PPV numbers were for the Pacquiao vs. Tim Bradley fight last June because HBO, for some reason, never released them and the only thing we have to go by are the numbers that Arum is reporting.

There’s no doubt that a lot of diehard boxing fans will be showing up for the Pacquiao-Marquez fourth fight in Las Vegas. I’m just surprised that Arum didn’t try to stick the fight at the Cowboys Stadium in Texas, because of a fight like Pacquiao vs. Joshua Clottey was able to get 41,000 seats sold then surely Pacquiao-Marquez would have to get nearly doubt that number. I wonder why didn’t try to shoot for the Cowboys Stadium for this fight? It doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense putting the fight in Las Vegas in a venue that only holds 16,800 seats.

This should be the last fight between these two guys if everything goes right as planned. Presumably If Marquez destroys Pacquiao or if Pacquiao beats Marquez by a lopsided decision then the seemingly never-ending rematches between the two of them will have reached their end. I don’t believe it. The only way it ends is when the PPV and the gate numbers go down. Until then, these guys will probably be fighting long after their teeth fall out and their hair turns silver. When there’s money to be got it’s obviously hard to walk away from it.