MANNY Pacquiao is expected to arrive in Los Angeles on Feb. 9 in time for the four-city press tour that will promote his May 7 (May 8 in Manila) fight against Sugar Shane Mosley at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.
The press tour will take the two to Las Vegas, New York City and Washington D.C., according to Robert Morales of BoxingScene.com.
The press tour, Morales said, will be shown on CBS/Showtime and will also air the fight.
Morales said promoter Bob Arum is excited over this new development that guarantees a bigger audience come fight time.
The fight, according to Morales, will be televised by Showtime, but its parent company, CBS, will play a significant role in promoting the fight. This development is considered a coup for Showtime, which has always played second fiddle to HBO, which typically does the bigger fights.
“CBS, it gives us a terrestrial platform to publicize and promote the fight,” Morales quoted Arum as saying. Arum will be in Beverly Hills next week on the first stop of the four-city tour.
“Heretofore, whether it was on HBO or Showtime, you were limited to a relatively small slice of the audience. Twenty-eight million for HBO, 23 million for Showtime, I believe,” Arum said, adding CBS reaches about 150 million homes.
“Everyone in the country will be aware of this fight and we believe they will be interested enough so that a sizable portion of those people will buy the fight,” Arum was quoted as saying. “We think we have the tools now to really enhance the pay-per-view audience.
“If it was merely a lateral move from HBO to Showtime, we wouldn?t have considered it because HBO has done a very good job for us on pay-per-view,” Arum said. “But this adds such a dimension; it was a no-brainer.”
