Believe the hype. Even before tickets for the Dec. 6 bout between Oscar De La Hoya and Manny Pacquiao were sold to the public last Sept. 24, there were already sellers on the Internet with an asking price of as much as $ 35,000 for a premium ringside seat although the face value of one is a mere $ 1,500.
But since the co-promoters — Top Rank and Golden Boy (GBP) — and even the MGM Mirage group have gotten the lion?s share, fight fans were left scrambling for crumbs that were wiped out in less than two hours and produced the second biggest gate in history at $ 17 million in the process.
Top Rank and GBP had bulk orders for these coveted tickets, while MGM Mirage had to do the same to entice their regular visitors who are mostly high-rollers to show up in Las Vegas a day or two before the Dec. 6 bout at the Grand Garden Arena.
A check on the Internet reveals that the cheapest ticket that had a face value of $ 150 was selling between $ 600 to $ 800.
Other tickets that were sold last Sept. 24 were priced at $ 1,000, $ 750, $ 500 and $ 250 and in the days leading to the fight, the prices of these will snowball even further in the black market.
Asked about the plenty of requests for complimentary tickets to his fight, Pacquiao sounded bothered that he won?t be able to please everyone who will ask not only for one, but two or more as in the past when these requests were made directly or by way of his many friends.
“Yeah, I know,” said Pacquiao late last week from San Diego.
Wakee Salud, a confidant of Pacquiao, has learned a lesson.
“In the previous fights, there were requests for tickets that I paid for in advance and some of these people did not even show up in Las Vegas,” said Salud.
Owing to the difficulty in finding tickets nowadays, Salud said he will exercise extreme caution this time.
“No pay, no ticket,” said Salud.
In Pacquiao?s high-profile fights with the likes of Erik Morales, Marco Antonio Barrera and Juan Manuel Marquez, the highest-priced tickets sold for only 0 although when the Filipino fought Oscar Larios in July 2006, a special section in the ringside section at the Araneta Coliseum was worth P50,000 each.
The priciest so far was when Lennox Lewis and Mike Tyson took center stage in June 2002 at the Pyramid Arena in Memphis, Tennessee, when a ringside seat was pegged at $ 2,400. Incidentally, Pacquiao saw action in the undercard of this fight where he blew away Colombian Jorge Eliecer Julio in less than two rounds.
