“I never would root for someone to die, couldn’t do that, but I wouldn’t mind seeing this guy bounced around a little bit in that rocket.”–BOB ARUM, before promoting Evel Knievel’s ridiculous 1974 Snake River Canyon motorcycle jump.
(See former Boston Globe colleague Leigh Monvtille’s absorbing book on Knievel entitled, “Evel, The High Flying Life of Evel Knievel: American, Showman, Daredevil and Legend.”) It must be noted that the acidic tongued Arum has kept his mouth shut on the temtping subject of PPV TV sales for the Victor Ortiz-Floyd Mayweather Jr. fight. Reporting actual, verifiable numbers of PPV TV boxing “buys” is almost always an inexact venture. When there are good numbers to report, promoters like to inflate them. When they are disappointing or, worse yet, dismal, promoters like to say they are still being tallied or that numerous precincts have not reported yet or that the numbers crunchers at the cable companies and the PPV TV distributor are working round the clock to ascertain the final figures. Much of what you hear and read about PPV fight “buys” is guesswork. I hear that bulldog reporter Steve Kim says he hears that Ortiz-Mayweather did something like 850,000 “buys” or less than half of what one of the overoptimistic promoters predicted. If the Ortiz-Mayweather numbers were anywhere over the one million mark, you have to think the Mayweather camp would be on Facebook, on Twitter and everywhere else chirping about such a success. But there’s an eerie silence which, as we all know in the suspicious minds of boxing people, leads to group think that there has been a disaster of some kind. If the 850,000 number is a true one–and we may never know about that–then it is possible that the Nov. 12 Juan Manuel Marquez-Manny Pacquiao Chapter III bout could double that number. I don’t think low numbers for Ortiz-Mayweather actually say anything about Floyd’s TV drawing power. But it speaks volumes about how Ortiz was a weak “B side” on that Sept. 17 card.
