LOS ANGELES ? Filipino boxing icon Manny Pacquiao spent his rest day replenishing his energy after a weeklong grind and sharing quality time with family and friends less than two weeks before his megafight with Floyd Mayweather Jr.
It was a long Sunday afternoon that started with church service and saw Pacquiao later giving close to $152,000 or P6.7 million to the ?biggest losers.?
He also had a sumptuous meal in a luxurious Japanese restaurant in the Hollywood area with family and friends numbering around 100. The bill came up to $3,700, paid by Pacquiao.
It was hardly a drop in the bucket considering that Pacquiao is to receive $50 million from promoter Bob Arum on the very first business day after the May 2 showdown at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in what has long been hyped as the richest, biggest fight in boxing history.
?On Monday morning, I will hand Manny a check for $50 million as a down payment, guaranteed,? Arum said in a New York Times report.
It is a bit more complicated than that ? it is a wire transfer, actually, and 30 percent of it will be shaved off for the Internal Revenue Service, Arum said. But the bottom line is that the long-anticipated championship welterweight match between Pacquiao and Mayweather will earn hundreds of millions of dollars, mostly for the fighters. Headlines ( Article MRec ), pagematch: 1, sectionmatch: 1
Mayweather will receive a substantial portion of his earnings immediately after the fight, said Leonard Ellerbe, chief executive of Mayweather Promotions. He would not disclose how much.
?I will tell you this,? Ellerbe said. ?Floyd Mayweather?s check will be a lot more than $50 million. And then it goes from there.?
The contract calls for Mayweather to receive 60 percent of revenues. Pacquiao will get 40 percent. When all the accounting is done, each fighter should make well over $100 million, about double the biggest previous boxing payout, demonstrating that boxing?s slow fade in popular culture has not diminished the potential financial returns of the biggest bouts.
?This is a unique situation, the confluence of time and event ? the two biggest fighters in the world coming together,? said Ken Hershman, president of HBO Sports.
Mayweather (47-0) and Pacquiao (57-5-2) are generally regarded as the two best fighters, perhaps in any weight class, of the past decade. But tangled in boxing?s familiar knot of egos, contracts and self-preservation, a head-to-head bout looked unlikely as the aging boxers (Mayweather is 38, Pacquiao 36) moved toward retirement.
A chance face-to-face meeting between Mayweather and Pacquiao at a Miami Heat basketball game in January prompted true negotiations between the two sides, with Pacquiao agreeing to second billing in promotional materials and a lower percentage of the payout.
?We?re both bigger names than we were five, six years ago,? Mayweather said at his gym in Las Vegas on Tuesday. ?We?re meeting at the pinnacle of our careers. The time is right.?
The numbers are dizzying, even for Mayweather, nicknamed Money, whose estimated $105 million in two fights last year made him the world?s highest-paid athlete. To keep it all straight, HBO and Showtime, rival networks sharing the broadcast rights to the fight in a rare agreement, have created a central accounting system.
HBO has a long-term contract with Pacquiao, while Showtime has rights to Mayweather?s fights. The only other time the networks have worked together in such a way was when Mike Tyson fought Lennox Lewis in 2002.
?They distribute the revenue in accordance with the contracts of the two fighters, so that there is no side money,? Arum said. ?We felt that this was the most reasonable way to go. It?s the way we?ve done it to prevent the accusations that we usually get, that this promoter is stealing from that promoter.?
All revenues from the fight ? the foreign broadcast rights, closed-circuit income from bars and theaters, ticket sales, sponsorships, merchandise sales and so on ? goes into the pot. That will be about $130 million.
The biggest revenue stream will come from the pay-per-view broadcast, sold to households by cable systems and satellite providers at a suggested price of $89.95. Mayweather?s 2007 defeat of Oscar De La Hoya was purchased by nearly 2.5 million households, but expectations are that this one will easily surpass that mark.
