By Chris Williams: Top Rank promoter Bob Arum must be positively gleeful right now with the tickets almost sold out for his Terence Crawford vs. Viktor Postol fight card this Saturday night at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada.
The Arena has been retrofitted to seat 9,000 for the fight, and of the total, only 1,500 tickets are remaining. Arum believes that this success will carry over to the pay-per-view sales on HBO. I’m not sure that I agree with that, but that’s what 84-year-old Arum seems to think.
“Arum said MGM Grand Garden Arena is set up for 9k seats. Said about 1500 left. Crawford-Postol #boxing,” said Dan Rafael on his Twitter.
The undercard fights are as follow:
Oscar Valdez (19-0, 17 KOs) vs. Matias Adrian Rueda (26-0, 23 KOs)
Jose Benavidez Jr. (24-0, 16 KOs) vs. Francisco Santana (24-4-1, 12 KOs)
Oleksandr Gvozdyk (10-0, 10 KOs) vs. Tommy Karpency (26-5-1, 15 KOs)
Of those fights, I rate the Valdez-Rueda match-up as the only real interesting fight on the undercard. I don’t rate light heavyweight Gvozdyk as future world champion material, and don’t rate welterweight Jose Benavidez as a future world champion either.
Valdez is a very good fighter and he can finally win a world title now that Vasyl Lomachenko is gone. If he was still there, then Valdez would likely lose badly to him. Lomachenko is more talented fighter than Valdez in my view. Valdez is very good though, and he should do well now that the featherweight division has thinned out with Orlando Salido and Lomachenko gone.
“I do not consider myself an underdog in this fight. Terence Crawford’s fans might consider me as the underdog but that does not bother me,” said Postol via ESPN.com. “I’m 100 percent confident in myself and in my victory and the reasons are simple. I work harder in training camp than my opponents because I have to, because I want to.”
This would be a real brutal blow if Postol beats Crawford on Saturday night, because Arum seems to be counting on Crawford winning this fight. If Crawford loses, then Arum is going to need to make a couple of quick decisions about what he wants to do with his aging superstar Manny Pacquiao in terms of an opponent for him in his next fight on November 5.
Arum has made it pretty clear that he wants to match Crawford against Pacquiao. But if Crawford loses to Postol, then I think we’ll see Arum ignore Postol and have WBO welterweight champion Jessie Vargas be the one that faces Pacquiao. Arum promotes Vargas, as well as Postol and Crawford. Vargas has a small fan base in the U.S, but he still appears to have more fans than the Ukrainian Postol.
I can’t see Arum entertaining for even a second of having Postol face Pacquiao. Besides the likelihood that a Pacquiao-Postol fight won’t sell PPVs, it’s also a fight that Pacquiao would likely lose. Arum would see Pacquiao finished off by Postol as a PPV guy. Pacquiao would then probably retire for good without turning one of Arum’s fighters into a star.
I think Arum needs Crawford to be the one that beats Pacquiao rather than Postol. I think Arum believes that a win for Crawford over Pacquiao turns him into a star. I don’t believe that will happen, but I think that’s how Arum sees it. It’s too late in the game for Crawford to be turned into a star from a win over an old Pacquiao.
If Crawford beat Pacquiao seven years ago in 2009, then maybe there would be a chance that Crawford could become a lower level PPV guys. I’m not talking about a big PPV guy, because I don’t see Crawford as ever having any chance of that happening. But if he had beaten Pacquiao seven years ago, I think Crawford would be a guy that could bring in maybe 200,000 PPV buys per fight. Since that’s not happening, I don’t see Crawford getting a bounce from beating an old Pacquiao. In other words, I see Crawford remaining pretty much the same fighter he is today in terms of popularity if he beats Pacquiao.
I really think Postol has a good chance of beating Crawford if he knocks him unconscious on Saturday night. If it goes to the cards, I don’t give Postol a chance of winning a decision. I don’t think they’ll give it to him even if he totally dominates Crawford.