By Chris Williams: Top Rank promoter Bob Arum is still having problems putting together a fight between WBO featherweight champion Vasyl Lomachenko (5-1, 3 KOs) and former WBA featherweight champion Nicholas Walters (26-0-1, 21 KOs) for June 11th. Arum wants to televise the fight on HBO Championship Boxing and stage it at Madison Square Garden in New York.
Arum is having problems due to Walters asking for more money than he’s willing to give. If he can’t get Walters to come down in price, Arum will look to get a replacement opponent to match against Lomachenko.
Arum has three candidates in mind for the fight. Walters isn’t a big star, so it’s hard to understand why he’s asking for a ton of money. Fortunately for Arum, he promotes both guys, so that increases the chance that the fight could wind up getting made.
Arum is also working on a unification fight between WBO light welterweight champion Terence Crawford (28-0, 20 KOs) and WBC 140lb champion Terence Crawford (28-0, 12 KOs) for HBO pay-per-view this summer on July 23. This is the fight that Arum recently predicted would bring in 3 million PPV buys on HBO.
If the Crawford-Postol fight brings in 3 million buys, it means the demand for that fight is well above the Gennady Golovkin vs. David Lemieux fight from last October. That fight brought in just 100,000 PPV buys. So what Arum is saying is that Postol and Crawford must be more popular than Golovkin, and I don’t believe that for a second. There’s no comparison. The two of them combined don’t have Golovkin’s popularity in my view. I think Crawford-Postol will do between 20,000 to 30,000 PPV buys under the best case. They might end up lower.
“We’re discussing it with both of them and trying to get the numbers right,” Arum said to ESPN.com. “Negotiations are going on and we’re getting very close.”
Arum is confident that he can put together the Postol vs. Crawford fight. That’s a positive at least. Arum just needs to have a realistic view of what the fight is capable of doing in terms of PPV numbers. It’s clearly way too early for either of these guys to be on PPV. If fighters like Tim Bradley and Danny Garcia are unable to be the A-side headliner in PPV fights, then of course it’s an insane idea to put unfamiliar fighters like Crawford and Postol in a PPV fight on HBO. I’m sure the boxing fans will look at the advertisements for the Crawford-Postol fight on PPV. but I don’t see very many fans wanting to dig for the money to watch it. I’m wondering what Arum is going to charge for the fight.
I can’t even imagine paying $70 to see Crawford-Postol. I think a nice price for Postol vs. Crawford would be in the $2 range. I could see paying between $1.50 to $2 for the fight, but that’s it. Even $2 is steep in my view for a fight like that my opinion. I really don’t see either of these guys ever becoming real PPV attractions. Arum can shove Postol and Crawford down the boxing public’s throat for the remainder of their careers, and I think the end result will be them not ever bringing in a high number of buys. If anything, putting Postol and Crawford on PPV now may actually hurt their careers rather than help them because they won’t be seen by as many people.
“We’re still talking to Walters but it’s a Lomachenko date. We’ll find another opponent if Walters is not reasonable,” Arum said to ESPN.com. “There’s a dialogue going back and forth but I can’t pay him what I don’t have. He’s off the million dollars but he has to come down. Look, I’m willing to do this for a slight loss but I’m not going to blow to my brains out.”
It’ll be interesting to see who Lomachenko winds up fighting if Walters won’t be fighting him. I don’t see Lomachenko as a main event type of fighter even on regular HBO. I think it would bring in terrible ratings on HBO if Lomachenko is the main event and not fighting someone really popular. Arum needs a guy Nonito Donaire to fight Lomachenko for it to have a chance for big ratings. I don’t think Donaire would accept a fight with Lomachenko now that he’s moved back down to super bantamweight.
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