The meme that people pay money to see Mayweather lose lacks credibility, despite being repeated ad nauseum?
Floyd Mayweather?s wattage has not dimmed.
Despite the obits pronouncing the pound-for-pound king?s waning popularity, despite calls for a boycott of the fight, the numbers for last week?s rematch with Marcos Maidana tell another story.
According to the Nevada State Athletic Commission, Mayweather-Maidana II sold 14,859 of 15,939 available tickets for a total of $14,899,150, lagging slightly behind the grandiloquently named ?The Moment,? the first fight between the two fighters. ESPN.com has reported, unbelievably, that no complimentary tickets were distributed to whales, celebrities, and close friends of the champ.
On the pay-per-view front, Saturday?s fight did better business than Mayweather-Maidana I. ?Mayhem? generated over 925,000 buys, making it PPV Fight of the Year. Manny Pacquiao vs. Timothy Bradley II, another unnecessary rematch, ran a very distant second with less than 500,000 buys.
The meme that people pay money to see Mayweather lose lacks credibility, despite being repeated ad nauseum. But like all facile explanations it serves a purpose. It provides a narrative when one has no substantive narrative of one?s own. If the hundreds of thousands who tuned in did so to see Mayweather lose, wouldn?t it be counterproductive to swell his already swollen bank account, thereby helping him win?
It makes no sense, but many things make no sense.
Counting ticket sales and pay-per-view is a good deal easier than taking a measure of the fight. Assuming the majority who watched are not hardcore fight fans but advocates of spectacle for spectacle?s sake, they may not have noticed that ?Mayhem? failed to live up to expectations. But that?s more or less the norm where Mayweather?s fights are concerned, and the exceptions, of which the first fight was one, succeed at proving the rule.
