By Chris Williams: Golden Boy Promotions president Oscar De La Hoya says he’s losing patience waiting for a mega fight between Floyd Mayweather Jr and Manny Pacquiao to happen. De La Hoya says he’s been waiting for ages for the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight to happen, but he’s now no longer looking forward to that fight.
Instead, De La Hoya is looking towards a fight that his company Golden Boy will be putting together with Top Rank in early next year between Saul “Canelo” Alvarez and WBC middleweight champion Miguel Cotto.
De La Hoya thinks the Canelo-Cotto fight can go as high as 2 million pay-per-view buys like the Canelo vs. Mayweather and the De La Hoya vs. Mayweather fights did.
“I’m still optimistic like very fan out there, I’m waiting patiently and my patience is starting to run out, and I’m now I’m smiling over Cotto-Canelo, which I know will fill the void that fans have,” De La Hoya said to USAtoday.com. “I believe Cotto-Canelo can take boxing to a whole new level. That’s the fight that I want to see. I see no reason why the fight can’t get close to that 2 million pay-per-view buy mark. It’s a huge fight, and obviously you’ve got to give a lot of credit to Miguel Cotto, who’s an outstanding fighter. But you bring in the Canelo factor and it takes pay-per-view buys to a whole new level.”
Mayweather has already done his part in trying to get a Pacquiao fight put together. He’s already told Pacquiao what he needs to do in order for a fight to take place between them. It’s up to Pacquiao if he wants the fight with Mayweather bad enough to fulfill his wishes.
The Cotto vs. Canelo fight is a good one, but De La Hoya is kidding himself if he thinks that fight is going to get to the 2 million buy mark. We just Canelo bring in a little over 300,000 pay-per-view buys for his fights against Alfredo Angulo and Erislandy Lara.
Cotto brought in a round 300,000 pay-per-view buys for his fight against Sergio Martinez last June. That tells me that if you put Cotto and Canelo together, you might get 800,000 pay-per-view buys at best, but it also could be less than that number.
I don’t see a Cotto-Canelo fight doing big numbers without Mayweather fighting against one of them. The reason why Cotto and Canelo brought in big numbers in the past was because they were both fighting Mayweather. When you remove Mayweather from the equation, their numbers plummet dramatically. Cotto had big numbers when he fought Manny Pacquiao five years ago, but without Pacquiao and Mayweather, Cotto’s PPV numbers are pretty much nowhere.
Mayweather will continue to be the biggest pay-per-view fighter in boxing until he retires. It doesn’t matter if Canelo and Cotto fight on the same night as him, he’ll still likely bring in more PPV buys no matter who he faces than the Cotto-Canelo fight.
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