By Chris Williams: Few casual boxing fans are familiar with fighter Chris Algieri (20-0, 8 KOs), and many of the ones that know of him aren’t what I would consider huge fans of his. Never the less, Top Rank promoter Bob Arum believes the 30-year-old Algieri could become a star if he beats Arum’s fighter WBO welterweight champion Manny Pacquiao (56-5-2, 38 KOs) in their fight on November 22nd at the Cotai Arena, Venetian Resort, Macao, Macao S.A.R., China.
Arum notes that Algieri is intelligent and well-spoken, and he believes that those attributes will help turn him into a star if he can beat Pacquiao.
Unfortunately it’s not likely that Algieri will be anymore a star if he beats Pacquiao than he is right now, because we’ve seen from the past that beating Pacquiao doesn’t mean you become a star. Tim Bradley beat Pacquiao, yet he never become a star or pay-per-view fighter. Algieri can beat Pacquiao, but it doesn’t mean he’s going to become a star or even come close to that.
“Commercially, if you beat somebody like Manny Pacquiao, particularly someone as media friendly and so crowd friendly as Algieri, he would instantly be a huge attraction in the sport of boxing,” Arum said to Dan Rafael of ESPN.com.
I don’t think Algieri is going to become a huge attraction if he beats Pacquiao. A victory over Pacquiao will get Algieri a rematch against him, and he’ll make a lot of money in that fight. But there’s little chance that he’ll become a star just because he beats the soon to be 36-year-old Pacquiao. I don’t see it like that.
Algieri doesn’t have a fan friendly fighting style, and that’s going to continue him for the remainder of the career in trying to build up a fan base. He doesn’t have a ready-made fan base to count on like some fighters do. Algieri’s style of talking doesn’t connect to the average boxing fan in my view, because Algieri speaks more like a professor than a fighter.
Algieri is too different from many of the fans that watch boxing, and I don’t think that’s a good thing. Algieri’s way of talking might interest Arum, but then again Arum has a Harvard degree. It’s not surprising that he likes the way Algieri speaks.
At best, I believe Algieri is someone that can bring in decent ratings in non-pay-per-view fights on HBO if he’s matched against the right guy, but I don’t see him being someone that can bring in over 1 million viewers or even half of that like Gennady Golokvin. It doesn’t matter if Algieri beats Pacquiao. I still don’t think Algieri will become a star.
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