Bob Arum exhales a deep sigh as he weighs up the question – but the answer is yes. The man who has spent a lifetime promoting super-fights for legends such as Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, Marvin Hagler and Thomas Hearns says that Floyd Mayweather versus Manny Pacquiao has surpassed everything for him. He has never experienced anything quite like this.
First, the attritional nature of the negotiations, he says, have exceeded anything he went through with Don King. The Ali-Frazier and Hagler-Hearns deals were a cakewalk compared to getting this fight to happen, he says.
But it is the sheer scale of the fight that has him catching his breath. He now thinks it could gross $540 million (?355 million), almost $400 million (?263 million) more than the previous biggest grossing fight in history between Mayweather and Saul Alvarez in 2013.
May-Pac merchandise is everywhere at the MGM Grand
“The revenue for all sources, from other than the pay-per-view, will be probably around $140 million from the foreign sales, from the sponsorship, from the gate,” Arum says as he takes a break this week in the American sunshine. “As for the PPV, we don’t know whether it will reach three million homes or four or five million homes. The way everything’s going, it looks like it will be an extraordinarily high number. People who have never watched a boxing match are talking about this. They’re all familiar with this whole thing now. Could we hit four million homes? Absolutely.” The maths say that that would take it well over $500 million.
The big question now, though, is can the action match the hype. It is just over 30 years since the battle between Hagler and Hearns, which has gone down as one of the most thrilling fights of all time. Can Saturday night match that?
“It seems like yesterday,” Arum says looking back at the events of 1985. “I remember I was sitting next to Joan Rivers at ringside and she looked at me in the first round and said, ‘Bob, are all these fights like this?’ I said, ‘No, Joan, you’re watching something special.”
Arum says it is “really hard for me to say” whether Mayweather-Pacquiao can match it, explaining: “A lot of that is because the world has changed. When Ali and Frazier fought we had no domestic satellites. We’d just started international satellites and there were very few. You had to book them in advance and you couldn’t distribute the signal all over the world. It was very, very primitive.
“When Hagler and Hearns fought, 14 years later, we still had closed circuit. We were getting satellites but very little pay per view and we had nothing like the internet or social media which we now have. We’re talking about a journey from a horse and carriage to a new automobile. It can’t be compared.
Manny Pacquiao holds a public work-out in California
“Vegas has seen plenty of weeks like this. But in the days of Hagler-Hearns, they didn’t have enough hotel rooms and people weren’t coming to Vegas unless they had tickets for the fight. Now thousands of people, maybe upwards of 100,000 people, will come to Vegas just to be on the scene. Vegas will have a monster, monster weekend and a monster night, but this is Vegas, they’re used to monster nights.
“When Hagler and Hearns fought, the gambling was different because they’d come with a suitcase of cash and gamble. Now you can’t put up more than $10,000 without having to do a report. People who are heavy gamblers, Americans who are heavy gamblers, have all pretty much died out. The younger people, while they spend a lot of money in the clubs and restaurants, are not gamblers like they used to be. Gaming was about 75 per cent of the income at Caesars when Hagler and Hearns fought. It’s probably now down to about 30 per cent. Everything is different.”
Mayweather’s Grand Arrival in the lobby of the MGM Grand on Tuesday is certain to be different from anything seen before too. Arum says it was something he never wanted Pacquiao to do.
“I didn’t want to do a grand arrival,” he says. “I don’t think given the intensity and publicity surrounding this fight that it’s safe to do a grand arrival. I am not satisfied with that type of crowd control. What I am doing instead is having a ballroom that is going to be roped off at the Mandalay Bay Hotel. Manny is going to come in with Freddie and myself and maybe Buboy Fernandez and we will spend half an hour stirring up the crowd and then we whisk Manny away to a private room.”
May-Pac stamps roll off the press in Manila
Arum insists he is not worried about any Mayweather trash-talking on Tuesday and insists he is more concerned with how the Philippine press will be treated in Vegas.
“There’s a massive turnout and they’ve got to accommodate more Philippine press than they plan to do. I agree that not all of them can sit in the press section but they’ve got to be accredited to watch it in the ballroom on the closed circuit. One of the fighters is an iconic native son. The Philippine press have got to be treated fairly and correctly. To do otherwise would be a black mark on the MGM and the Nevada Commission.”
But it is the negotiating – getting these fights to happen – that Arum feels has changed the most in 30 years.
“I wouldn’t say the Hagler-Hearns negotiations were easy but they weren’t the marathon that Mayweather-Paquiao was. When you look at it, it was really unnecessary,” he says.
Arum has lost none of his passion for taking on rival promoters over the years. And Al Haymon, Mayweather’s adviser, has been on the receiving end of his ire as the fight nears.
“It was one guy behind a curtain trying to influence what he can,” says Arum. “That’s Al Haymon. Negotiating with him is like torture.”
The main point of contention was over ticket distribution for Top Rank, Arum’s company, and Mayweather Promotions. “I know why he was doing it, but we battled up until a couple of days ago. We battled to get a signed agreement with the MGM. The MGM signed a deal with him and said they would not allow anybody at the MGM to even talk to us. They closed us out of the negotiations and we didn’t even get a contract until April 15. That was unacceptable. This went on day after day after day until finally they had to capitulate. I have never, ever in 50 years seen something as bad as this.”
