I don’t have any problem with mere puffery.
Like any salesman, a boxing promoter is more than entitled to hype his products.
But, while Golden Boy just used its own house organ to play some happy music about how the Juan Manuel Marquez-Floyd Mayweather bout last Saturday night, banged out an amazing 1 million PPV TV buys, a more revealing and truthful statistic has emerged from a more credible source, the Nevada boxing commission.
Mayweather, the awesome American superstar fighting the supposedly wildly popular Mexican superstar, fought in an arena which was about 25 per cent empty. There were sections of seating at the MGM Grand Arena where you could have fired cannons without harming anyone.
Now, in fairness, a full arena doesn’t always equate to a rousing PPV buy rate. But I must point out that Marquez-Mayweather would be considered a live gate flop despite selling $6 million worth of ducats.
I wrote before the bout, both at Examiner.com and on Boxingconfidential, that tickets were given away and there was no denial from the promoter. Now you know why because it’s difficult to deny a widely known truth.
You see, one must apply Gainford’s Law, named for Sugar Ray Robinson handler George Gainford, who used to say when someone would tell him the seating capacity of a venue, “It’s not how many seats you have in the building, it’s how many asses you have in them seats.”
Gainford was interested in paying customers, not empty chairs.
So Juan Ma, fighting on Mexican Independence Weekend, and Money could only combine to move about 12,000 ducats in a 17,000 seat configuration.
There were 900 freebies, which back in the day were called “Annie Oakley” tickets because they went untaxed and had to have a hole punched in them.
About 4,000 seats went unsold.
Don’t expect any Golden press release on this or any flowing words from Richie Rich Schaefer.
Truth be told, Money May is not box office magic even in his home town.
One guy from Caguas, Puerto Rico, and one from General Santos City, have already won the live gate fight against Li’l Floyd and they don’t even start counting their money until Nov. 14.
L’il Floyd only sold L’il Tickets.
