By Dan Ambrose: Oscar Valdez vs. Shakur Stevenson super featherweight unification fight on April 30th will sell out the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, predicts Top Rank promoter Bob Arum.
ESPN’s decision to schedule the Valdez – Shakur 130-lb unification clash during the NFL draft week in late April will result in many football fans purchasing tickets to see the fight, even though they’re not necessarily boxing fans.
There will be millions of fans tuning in for the NFL draft week, and Arum believes that a good percentage will purchase tickets for the Valdez-Stevenson fight at the MGM Grand or watch it on ESPN+.
Arum says that the second Tyson Fury vs. Deontay Wilder fight took advantage of the massive amount of fans that streamed into Vegas that weekend for the Chicago Bears vs. Las Vegas Raiders that weekend, and they ended up purchasing tickets in mass numbers to make the Fury-Wilder II fight a success at the box office.
“A terrific fight. Shakur is a wonderful defensive fighter, who is now developing a little pop, as he showed against Jamel Herring,” said Boob Arum to the Three Knockdown Rule on the Oscar Valdez vs. Shakur Stevenson fight on April 30th.
“Oscar Valdez, who seems like when he gets a really big challenge like he did against [Miguel] Berchelt, rises to the occasion,” Arum continued. “I throw out his last fight [Robson Conceicao] because of all of the accusations of drug use, which are so unfair. I think it played on Oscar’s psyche.
“But Oscar wanted the fight with Shakur. I think it’s going to be a tremendous, tremendous battle and I’m confident that it’ll sell out the MGM Grand because our geniuses at ESPN have put it right in connection with draft week…A small percentage of the [millions] of people will purchase tickets for the [Valdez vs. Stevenson] fight.
“Just when Fury fought Wilder, we were in a little bit of a panic the last time they fought because of the travel ban, we couldn’t get any Brits for the second fight they did. There were about 5,000 Brits in the audience.
“As you recall the last fight they did, Wilder and Fury, there were no Brits there, virtually none, because of the travel ban.
What saved us is the Raiders were playing at home the next day against the Chicago Bears, and there were 20,000, 30,000 fans of the Chicago Bears in town and they hit that box office like it was a tackling dummy and bought up all the extra tickets that we hadn’t sold,” said Arum.