By Eric Baldwin: The pay-per-view numbers are now out for IBF/IBO/WBA/WBC middleweight champion Gennady “GGG” Golovkin’s fight last Saturday night against Daniel “Miracle Man” Jacobs on HBO, and they’re not great with just 170,000 PPV buys. According to Kevin Iole of Yahoo Sports, Golovkin’s promoter Tom Loeffler of K2 Promotions has confirmed the 170,000 PPV buys for the Golovkin-Jacobs fight on HBO. What this means for boxing is not likely good.
It might mean that Golovkin won’t get the fight with Saul “Canelo” Alvarez for September like he’d been hoping for. Canelo’s promoter Oscar De La Hoya of Golden Boy Promotions said on Thursday of this week that he wanted to wait until Golovkin’s PPV numbers for the Jacobs fight were released before he started talking about putting the fight with Canelo together. Now that they’re out, it’s not good for Triple G. It puts Canelo and De La Hoya in the driver’s seat for the negotiations. The Canelo-Golovkin fight can still potentially happen, but it would be on Golden Boy’s terms.
If Loeffler and Golovkin are willing to give De La Hoya and Canelo a huge advantage in the negotiations, then the fight can probably get made, but the offer they receive might not be what they were hoping for. With Golovkin—Jacobs bringing in only 170K PPV buys, we might see a very low percentage offer from De La Hoya. He already said this week that the $15 guaranteed offer for Golovkin was now off the table after hearing the low PPV rumors for the Golovkin-Jacobs fight.
“Considering we were going against one of the biggest sporting events in the country, I was happy to see that Gennady was able to improve upon his first pay-per-view fight,” Loeffler said to Yahoo Sports.
It’ll be up to De La Hoya whether the 170,000 buys for Golovkin’s PPV fight was enough to make him want to give him a reasonable deal to fight his star Canelo in September on HBO. However, considering that De La Hoya has David Lemieux in his Golden Boy stable of fighters coming off of a big win over Curtis Stevens, it’s quite possible that he’ll choose to make a fight between him and Canelo next in September. De La Hoya would have a nice little money fight between Canelo and Lemieux, and he could push the Golovkin fight into 2018. Even then, there’s no guarantee that De La Hoya will offer Golovkin a better deal to fight Canelo. If Golovkin isn’t fighting on PPV like Canelo, there would be no reason for De La Hoya to give him a fair deal.
Canelo is fighting Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. on May 6 on HBO PPV, and that fight is expected to bring in a considerable number of buys. If Canelo then faces Lemieux in September and Miguel Cotto in December, as originally planned, he could have 3 tremendous PPV fights in a row. Golovkin and his promoter Loeffler won’t be in the position to bargain with De La Hoya for a Canelo fight in 2018. They would either have to take what they’re offered or move on, which I doubt they will. If Golovkin will be 35 in April, and it’s doubtful that he’ll be able to keep fighting at a high level for too much longer, especially now that Jacobs has created the blueprint in how to give him trouble.
All the fighters that Golovkin takes on from this point forward are going to be using movement on him and fast combinations the same way that Jacobs did. If Golovkin is going to keep knocking people out, he’s going to need to speed up his footwork at cutting off the ring, and learn how to throw sustained combinations. Those were the elements that were missing from Golovkni’s game against Jacobs. He was slow at cutting off the ring and he didn’t stay close to throw combinations when he was engaging with Jacobs. Instead, Golovkin would throw a punch or two and then back away. Most of the time, Golovkin was just throwing jabs.
Golovkin-Jacobs were competing with NCAA basketball and a Chicago Cubs-New York Mets baseball game. Having those events taking place on the same night as the Golovkin vs. Jacobs fight might have taken away potential viewers. The reality is that Golovkin-Jacobs was not good fight for PPV. Jacobs is not a big name. He’s a good fighter, but he’s been involved with so few notable fights over his entire career. The casual boxing fans probably have never heard of Jacobs. He’s not a fixture on HBO. That was potentially a problem as well. If you’re going to fight someone on PPV, you’ve got to pick fighters that the casual boxing fans are familiar with. Jacobs was the wrong opponent for a PPV fight. Canelo Alvarez would have the same problem if he fought Jacobs. You can’t sell a fight like that. Canelo vs. Jacobs might have brought in 300,000 buys like Canelo’s recent fight with Liam Smith, but probably not more than that.
Loeffler is interested in putting Golovkin in with WBO middleweight champion Billy Joe Saunders in June in a unification fight. That fight would give Golovkin the final middleweight title not already in his grasp. However, it’s still not much of a bargaining tool to get a decent split of the revenue for a fight against Canelo. The things that are important in negotiations are PPV numbers and ticket sales. Golovkin’s knockout streak and his domination of his opponents were two things that he had going for him. But with unable to get a knockout of Jacobs, the knockout streak ended. Moreover, Golovkin’s mystique of being a beast in the ring was erased by his performance against Jacobs.
Golovkin almost lost the fight. Whether Golovkin’s performance was due to a too conservative game plan by his trainer Abel Sanchez is unknown at this point. I don’t think it matters now. The fight is already done, and Golovkin has been exposed in the minds of a lot of boxing fans and obviously in the mind of De La Hoya. The only thing that Golovkin can do now is get back to his old style of fighting and put some good wins under his belt. Loeffler has been saying that he’s hoping that the top fighters will want to fight him now because they’ll think he’s vulnerable.
Perhaps the top guys will want to fight him. If Golovkin can face Saunders and beat him convincingly, and then beat Jacobs in a badly needed rematch, then that would go a long ways towards redeeming himself with the fans. But I don’t think it’s going to help Golovkin can a better percentage split for a fight with Canelo. I don’t think it will. I believe the only thing that will help Golovkin get a healthy percentage split is if he goes back to PPV and brings in at least 500,000 PPV buys against someone like Jacobs or another top fighter like Jermall Charlo.
Canelo could lock himself in as the A-side with 3 big fights in 2017 against Chavez Jr., Lemieux and Cotto. If Canelo wins all 3 fights and brings in huge PPV numbers, then Golovkin might need to accept a very low percentage for a fight against Canelo in my opinion. How low of a percentage? I’d say maybe 10-20%. I can’t see it any higher than that. Canelo is assuming the Floyd Mayweather Jr. role as the top PPV star in boxing now, and those were the kinds of percentage splits that Mayweather was known for at the end of his career. Manny Pacquiao got a 55-45 split of the revenue, but he was a proven PPV star in his own right, so he was able to do that. Golovkin hasn’t been able to get to the same level as Pacquiao in terms of buys, because of the opposition he’s been facing. Golovkin didn’t have the advantage to fight the well-known guys that Canelo has fought. Golovkin would be much more popular now if he had fought these past Canelo opponents: Mayweather, Shane Mosley, Amir Khan, Erislandy Lara, James Kirkland and Miguel Cotto.