pac995 By Jim Dower: WBO welterweight champion Manny Pacquiao (56-5-2, 28 KOs) and challenger Chris Algieri (20-0, 8 KOs) will start their long media tour this coming Monday, August 25th at the The Venetian Macao. They then plan on taking their media tour to Shanghai, San Francisco, California, Las Vegas, Nevada, Los Angeles and New York.

All total, they’ll be visiting 6 cities during the tour to help attract interest in their November 22nd fight in Macao, China. The fight will be televised on HBO pay-per-view in the United States. It’s unclear how much the 6-city tour is costing Top Rank, but you’ve got to assume it’s going to be costly.

It’s too bad they didn’t make it an 11-city tour because it would definitely help get more fans excited about the fight. Algieri isn’t a well-known fighter in terms of casual boxing fans, and Top Rank promoter Bob Arum might have made a miscalculation instead of selecting him instead of Ruslan Provodnikov with his more fan-friendly fighting style.

Provodnikov wouldn’t have been a great choice either due to him coming off of a loss to Algieri. Arum’s problem is that Pacquiao has already exhausted the biggest names Arum has in his Top Rank stable. The only guys left that he hasn’t fought are guys smaller than him or ones with no fan base whatsoever.

The 6-city tour will cover 27,273 miles in traveling from city to city. It’s going to be pretty grueling for the fighters to be getting flown from one place to another.

The flight from Macao to the U.S will be an especially long one. The good thing is that they’re doing the press tour well ahead of the fight so that the fighters can recover from all the airplane miles they log in.

Algieri is going to need to give as many interviews as possible to try and attract interest in the fight. The bigger the pay-per-view numbers the bigger his paycheck will be. His problem is he sounds more like a college professor than a fighter, and it might be tough for him to get a lot of boxing fans excited about seeing him and Pacquiao fight.