When Antonio Margarito and Shane Mosley duke it out for the WBA welterweight title this Saturday night at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, a sell-out crowd of 18,157 is not only anticipated, it’s expected. On Friday afternoon, a press release was sent out by Top Rank, which is co-promoting this event alongside Golden Boy Promotions, announcing that just 600 more seats (all in the upper tier of the arena) were available. As of late Tuesday afternoon, Lee Samuels of Top Rank said that about half of those were gobbled up.
There won?t be much of a walk-up crowd – because none will be needed.
18,157 tickets sold, in a major metropolitan city in a big league arena. To put this into perspective, that’s basically what the Lakers – always the hottest ticket in LA – draw. (Or to put it another way, that’s about three Clipper games). As you peruse the internet ticket brokers, you see that these ducats are going for well above face value at all price ranges. Right now, a prime ringside seat will cost you over a grand. Top Rank says that they are plum out of tickets. Even if Kobe Bryant decided to take in the fight, they wouldn’t have one for him. Although Samuels joked, “Well, for him we’ll definitely set up a chair in one of the sections. Maybe near the aisle.”
The bullish ticket sales are almost as big a story as the anticipated fight itself. In an era when true marquee attractions in this industry are few and far between, and most of the big promotions take place in casino settings, this has been a revelation. In many ways, it’s stunning. Mosley, for all his accomplishments, has never been a big draw, and up until last summer, Margarito wasn’t even an A-lister in the sport. Bob Arum admits that when this fight was first announced for the Staples Center, that, “We had hoped to do about 8,000 – 9,000.”
When asked about the brisk business at the box-office, Arum would say, “I don’t know about surprised, but I’m very gratified. It shows that when you price your tickets right you can attract a great crowd. We’re going to have tremendous celebrities at ringside; it became the thing to do in LA.”
There was a time when this region was a huge boxing city. It regularly had events at historic venues like the Grand Olympic Auditorium, the Fabulous Forum, Dodger Stadium, the LA Sports Arena and the Coliseum that drew sizable crowds. Like many other cities, as the big fights moved to the desert, this market dried up. But in recent years, with the commitment made to the sport by AEG (which owns the Home Depot Center and Staples Center), Los Angeles has had a bit of a revival. In a region this big, with this much of a Latin presence, boxing will always have some prominence.
The price points for this bout were set at $300, $150, $75, $50 and $25. The hope was to fill up the lower bowl of the arena, which is approximately 12,000 in capacity. But from the pre-sale, it was clear this fight was going to open up the rafters. “When we started getting the sales reports early on, it was a tremendous rush from the Lakers, the Clippers, and Kings customers,” Arum says of the three major Staples Center residents. “The building was selling a tremendous number of tickets. And then when we started getting calls from all these celebrities who were coming to the fight, who wanted tickets to the fight, we knew we had something special. Because remember when the first place we had gone was the MGM Grand and they did not feel that they could get a big crowd for the event in Las Vegas. It’s the best thing that ever happened to us that we ended up at Staples.”
There was a bit of serendipity to how this fight ended up in Southern California. Because the weekend of January 24th falls in between the NFL Championship Games and the Super Bowl, the MGM Grand believed that it would be difficult to attract their big customers for three consecutive weekends, especially in light of the current economic situation. And with discretionary income shrinking all over, there was a concerted effort to price these tickets as affordably as possible.
This may seem like a great job of promoting, but in all honesty, no real promoting was actually done for this event. In fact, not a single penny was spent on marketing by the two promoters. They didn’t need to. The fight itself drove this promotion. And it used a necessary formula for this particular area: a highly popular Mexican fighter against another established star. Which is precisely what Margarito is in the wake of his big victory over Miguel Cotto in July and Shane Mosley – who for all his struggles to develop his own fanbase – is a recognizable and familiar foe from nearby.
Margarito-Mosley kicks off an encouraging trend for 2009 that sees fights taking place in the hometowns and regions of the boxers that are headlining the marquee. Kelly Pavlik will play to a sold-out Chevrolet Center in Youngstown, Ohio on February 21st, while Miguel Cotto is expected to draw around 10,000 in his familiar haunts at the Madison Square Garden in New York. A week later in Houston, a full house is expected at the Toyota Center when local favorite Juan Diaz takes on Juan Manuel Marquez in an event promoted by Golden Boy. Outside of the proposed – but still not yet finalized – showdown between Manny Pacquiao and Ricky Hatton on May 2nd, most of the major bouts occurring this year are taking place in non-casino venues.
Boxing is once again being brought back to the masses.
“This is the year when boxing realized what all sports know,” explained Arum, “that if you have a Philadelphia Eagles-Arizona Cardinals game, you’ll sell-out in the stadium in Arizona. But if you put that same game in the Meadowlands you couldn’t get 25-percent of your seats filled. So it is what it is. You put the event where the fighters are popular. In other words, if I took the Cotto fight and put it at the Staples and put the Margarito-Mosley fight in the Garden, I would be singing the blues because it’s the wrong place for the fight. Nothing really to do with the casinos. The reason you did fights in casinos is because the casinos were attracting so many customers and they needed things to do that. You were able to ride that pony. ?But today, when the casino business is hurting, there aren’t many fights which will draw people to Las Vegas or to Atlantic City just to see the fight. Yeah, if you have Hatton-Pacquiao or De La Hoya-Pacquiao, but not for an ordinarily good fight. So you put the fight in a place where there’s going to be some connection and it’s going to draw. Most of these so-called promoters don’t know what the f**k they’re doing and they go for the easy buck and they take these events and they put it in a casino so they don’t have to work.
?For example, the Chad Dawson- Antonio Tarver fight, when it was at The Palms Casino, it sold 300 tickets. And guess where they’re going back? Why? Maybe they think they have 300 satisfied customers.”
The atmosphere and ambience at a casino fight is about as stale as three week old bread. The arena remains empty and devoid of any energy and the fans (many of whom are just casino comps) don’t show up until a few minutes before the main event. You see morgues with more life in them.
It’s just more fun to cover and view fights in free standing arenas with real diehards. They come early, they drink plenty of beer, and they raise hell all night. Arum says it’s more fun to promote these types of events.
?To be in these arenas, particularly to be in a place like Youngstown, you meet new people, you get different views from these people, you get to really see what they?re talking about. Not only about sports but about life. You get a different perspective on things. I’ve always done it throughout my career around the world, like Italy and France. It was a great experience. But it’s equally a great experience to do fights in these places in the United States. I remember the fights we did in Bismarck, North Dakota with Virgil Hill and the Texas fights we did in Lubbock with Robin Blake. So we’ve done that. These are the fights that I remember, much more than I do these fights, the cookie-cutter fights that you put in casinos.”
With years and years of fights being farmed out to Las Vegas and Atlantic City, where ticket prices are often exorbitant, has a whole generation of fans, who never had the opportunity to attend fights live and build loyalties to local prizefighters, been lost? “That may very well be,” admitted Arum. “I think we may have lost them in the sense that they’re not as enthusiastic because they haven’t seen top-flight live action. But look at a place like Youngstown when you bring it to them. It comes right back. So I think it’s a temporary thing.”
But will this recent trend be temporary? No other business has hurt itself with short-term thinking quite like boxing. As the economy recovers (knock on wood) and the fortunes of the casino resorts with it, who’s to say that the temptation to just automatically head to these properties en masse does not return?
?I never had that temptation, I was one of the few promoters – because I’m an old-timer – that put fights where the fans were and that’s what I enjoy doing, that’s what I like to do,” is Arum’s answer. “And I relied on less casinos than any other promoter. Now, we’re going to put fights in casinos if it justifies it. If it’s a very, very big fight because then that helps the casino attract customers – which were exactly what these fights were designed to do.
“Because people say, ‘Oh, we had all those great fights in Las Vegas,’ and they remember all these fights; what they failed to remember is those fights were really great fights but they were generally in a 4,500 seat building. When Sugar Ray Leonard won his title from Benitez and Hagler fought Antuofermo to a draw, it was at the old Caesars Palace indoor facility, the Pavilion, which had 4,500 seats for Christ?s Sake!!!”
SOLUTIONS
There is plenty of debate as to what will bring boxing ‘back’. There are many varying opinions on how to do that, but it says here that one of the most overrated – and simply untrue – theories is that boxing needs one ‘reeeaaaaaaal’ or ‘recognized’ champion per division. I know that in some circles there has been plenty of debate as to whether Margarito-Mosley is for true welterweight supremacy. No matter what side of this debate you fall on, it has been decided by some that the winner of this isn’t the ‘trrruuuueeee’ champion. So alas, it’s only for the supposedly ‘meaningless’ WBA strap.
Well, the backlash over this has been so vociferous, that the fans have gone out and bought all the tickets. Hey, no justice, no peace!!! Or, maybe, just maybe, the real key is to make the correct matchups, bring them to the proper venues and then price the tickets reasonably. It’s worked in Europe, where outside of perhaps Joe Calzaghe, most of their big names are supposedly fake and phony belt-holders but for some reason or another seem to attract big crowds and solid television ratings on a consistent basis. I don’t know, but it’s my guess that they do so because they create and cultivate local attractions and haven’t been held captive by casino money or premium television networks like in the States.
The proliferation of belts hasn’t hurt the boxing business nearly as much as the flawed business plan of those entrusted to continue the great tradition of this sport, which sees fighters fighting less than ever, in stale environments on smaller and smaller platforms.
Honestly, outside of a vocal and annoying few, most fans and pundits don’t care about who the ‘reeeaaaal’ champion is in all the weight classes. What they do care about is having attractive matchups taking place that are affordable and easy to attend. You can be the best fighter in a particular division (and be given that distinction by those who feel that it’s their duty), but if you’re involved in boring fights and never establish your own constituency, it doesn’t amount to a hill of beans.
Keep your ‘reeeeaaaal’ champions, give me fun fights that take place in areas where the fighters have been developed, get the fighters to be more active, keep as many fights off of pay-per-view and promote the hell out of them and this business can be viable again.
Margarito-Mosley proves that.
After all, it’s a ‘reeeaaaaal’ draw. And very few, if any, of those patrons give a damn if it’s for the ‘truuuueeee’ welterweight championship.
DECISIONS, DECISIONS
I know on the surface it seems like a shoe-in that I’ll be ringside for the fights on Saturday night, but I have to admit, I’m tempted by what’s going on across the street at the Nokia Theater, where Movin’ 93.9 is doing it’s ‘Freestyle Explosion’ that features Debbie Deb, Cover Girls, Lisa Lisa, Stevie B (Stevie B!!!) and Expose.
That’s almost as good a lineup as ‘Revenge, the Rematches.’
Maybe I’ll just have someone text me the results of the fight (and of course, I’ll Tivo the HBO broadcast) while I enjoy ‘Spring Love’ and ‘I Wonder if I Take You Home’. Seriously, this is a tough choice, I mean, Margarito-Mosley isn’t even for the ‘reeeeaaaaal’ welterweight championship. And also, two words:
Lisa Lisa.
MID-WEEK FLURRIES
Over 250 media credential requests have been sent in for this weekend?s fight, which is pretty sizable and indicative of the interest in this event….So it turns out Edgerrin James is alive and well. That’s great to see, as he’s one of my all-time favorite Hurricanes….By the way, 93.9 out here in SoCal has become my favorite radio station. They play stuff from the 80’s – or shall I say, the gr80ties, all day. I even heard ‘Lets Make Lots of Money’ from the Pet Shop Boys the other day….I’ve been told that IBF welterweight titlist Joshua Clottey has been moved off the February 21st show at the Garden by Top Rank…..Oh, and Pacquiao-Hatton still isn’t finalized. It will get done, right? Right? Bueller?!?!…..Speaking of entertainment choices on Saturday night in the Southland, I hear that the MMA show (which is being co-promoted by Golden Boy, oddly enough, with Affliction) in Anaheim is struggling mightily. And it’s no surprise given that ringside tix there were priced at $1,000. Geez, they might lose their T-shirts on this….
