Within three short hours of going on sale last Saturday, tickets for 2007’s most anticipated event of the year between Oscar De La Hoya and Floyd Mayweather would completely sell out, producing a record gate of $19 million, surpassing the previous high in the state of Nevada of $16,860,300 that was tallied up for the rematch between Lennox Lewis and Evander Holyfield in November of 1999.
Unfortunately, like many other big sporting events like the Super Bowl, Final Four and the NBA All-Star Game, the majority of the tickets did not get into the hands of ‘Joe Six-pack’ but instead to corporate interests, sponsors, A-list celebrities and VIPs.
It seems the real hardcore fan was victimized by the popularity of this fight.
“The last time a big fight was like this was when Oscar fought Trinidad, it was at the Mandalay Bay. There were 11,000 seats, none of them went for sale,” recalled Richard Schaefer, CEO of Golden Boy Promotions. “So this time we really wanted to make sure that a significant amount of tickets, almost 6,000 or so, were made available to the public. The other tickets, of course, the host hotel has obligations, the sponsors had tremendous ticket buys, HBO had a big ticket buy. We had a ticket buy, Mayweather has a big ticket buy. So there was basically just that many tickets which went for sale.”
A multitude of fans tried in vain to call up or log-in to buy tickets on the 27th of January. The most successful group of fans were those who actually went to the MGM Grand box office and waited in line that morning.
So if you?re a dedicated fan of the sport that watches ‘Friday Night Fights’ and ‘Solo Boxeo’ religiously, Tivo’s all the bouts and goes to local club shows, you had a better chance of getting De La Hoya-Mayweather seats if you consistently played $10,000 hands of poker at one of the hotels on the strip.
“But that’s why we’re going to make available a huge amount of closed-circuit seats as well,” says Schaefer. “This is the kind of fight we probably could have put – in order to satisfy more people – at the UNLV football stadium or something like that and sell 40,000 seats. And we would have sold those out.
“But you can only sell what you have.”
What’s happening here is not unique to boxing, and by comparison isn’t even that tawdry. In other sports, raffles are held for playoff games. And many times a legalized version of extortion takes place as fans in other sports are coerced into paying ‘personal seat licenses’ to keep their existing season seats. For college bowl games, the amount of tickets you can purchase is dependent many times on the level of donation you give to the university.
Welcome to the business side of sports. It’s as cutthroat and bottom-line driven as anything on Wall Street.
This bout is one of the rare fights where the demand far exceeds the supply. The MGM Grand Garden Arena has a capacity of 16,000 and Schaefer talked openly back in December as this bout was consummated how his office had taken several thousand ticket requests.
“You can’t really hold back,” he says. “We cut down on the pre-sales because, believe me, we would’ve pre-sold the entire venue very easily. But obviously we had to cut down on everybody and that’s just the way it is. But if you have somebody who is a regular sponsor of Golden Boy and they are buying tickets for every single fight, then you can not tell them, ‘OK, great, you’re buying all these tickets for all of these fights and now for Oscar’s fight, sorry, I can’t sell you any tickets.’ That’s not really fair, either.
But as Schaefer points out, there is a secondary market to buy tickets. And it comes with quite a price.
“I have to tell you when I looked at Ebay this morning and I see how many tickets are on sale there at double, triple or quadruple the price that were available at Ticketmaster, I think there were plenty of fans out there which had an opportunity and chance to buy these tickets and now you can find them on Ebay for those prices. With tickets, I’ve learned it’s a no-win situation. You can never satisfy everybody.”
(For the record, tickets were priced at: $150, $350, $1,000, $1,500 and $2,000.)
Schaefer is correct in many respects, but this whole process does come off as a bit elitist. This is boxing’s version of Studio 54 in the late 70’s, where it seems only the rich and famous get behind the velvet rope.
There was a time and place in boxing where its biggest bouts took place in large stadiums and makeshift arenas that could hold up to 100,000 patrons. Of course, that’s when boxing mattered in this country. Nowadays, casino-hotel resorts, with their gaming capabilities, dominate the landscape with their lucrative site fees.
But Schaefer says that the big stadium fight hasn’t completely gone the way of the Dodo bird.
“I talked today to some other venues, non-casino venues. I had a meeting this afternoon and we were talking about exactly that,” he said earlier this past week. “If you have 16,000 seats for sale and of that, maybe 6,000 go for sale to the public, another 4,000 or so is with the casino and the other ones are split up with these other parties and so on, then you basically see there is really no reason why a fight like that could not happen in Dodger Stadium, or in a Coliseum or in the Reliant Stadium in Houston, you name it. It can be in one of these big venues all over the United States, where you can fit 40-50,000 people.
“Because if the fight is there, if you can sell-out 6,000 tickets in a matter of less than three hours, it shows you – and that was not casino customers, this was the general public buying these tickets – we could have done it anywhere and if you have instead of 16,000, you have 50,000 people, the economics certainly start looking very good as well.
“So I wouldn’t say it’s really dominated by the casinos; again, it’s a matter of being fair. If you have the casinos doing all the other fights and then you have the Super Bowl of boxing and you tell them, ‘OK, thank you very much, you did all of these fights, but now this one we’re going to take somewhere else’ and that’s just not the way to do business. You have a relationship with somebody and you’re just not going to say, ‘OK, sorry, you helped us here but we’ll see you later.'”
Of course, you can turn that around and say that’s what was precisely done to some fans who bought tickets for Marco Antonio Barrera-Mzonke Fana and many other nondescript cards of the past.
It goes both ways.
Schaefer says this promotion will do everything it can to placate boxing fans who are on the outside looking in.
“We’re going to have about 30,000 or so closed-circuit seats available in Las Vegas. And other people said, ‘Well, if the lowest ticket price is $150, what we should have is the closed-circuit at $75.’ We said no. Oscar said we want to keep these tickets at $50 like they are for any other fight. We want to be able to make these closed-circuit seats very affordable and give all the fans an opportunity to be part of that weekend.”
The national press tour, which could begin February 20th in New York, will be made open to the public. As will the weigh-in the day before the fight. A Telefutura show is being planned for that Friday night at the MGM Grand, among other festivities related to De La Hoya-Mayweather.
“We really want to embrace the fans and we want them to have a part of the experience.”
It’s just unfortunate that for most, it won?t be inside the arena the night of the bout.
SHOWTIME
It was an interesting doubleheader on Showtime this past weekend, where Julio Diaz captured the IBF lightweight title and Chad Dawson would claim the WBC light heavyweight belt by outclassing Tomasz Adamek for most of the night.
In blowing out his knee, the broken down Jesus Chavez showed why a Vitali Klitschko should show the ability to actually get through a real fight before being given a shot at the heavyweight title. If Chavez was an appliance, his warranty had expired long ago.
As for ‘Bad’ Chad, a star may have been born in the 175-pound division. He may be a slick, southpaw, but he’s not one to Spinks out the joint (get it?). He’s got a rapier-like jab and showed an improving left hand under new trainer Floyd Mayweather Sr. However, he found out that in boxing, there is such a thing as a 15-run home run or a 35-point touchdown as he was drilled to the canvas in the tenth frame by the game Adamek, who nearly erased an insurmountable deficit. But still, an impressive outing anyway you look at it.
I know there is plenty of talk about a bout with Antonio Tarver (and his promoter Gary Shaw wouldn’t mind Roy Jones, either) but I get the sense that neither will bite. But how about the subplots that would exist in a future fight with Jeff Lacy, with Shaw, Dan Birmingham and Jim Wilkes all involved?
WHO’S PAUL WILLIAMS?
I know there was a press release put out by Top Rank early last week that WBO welterweight king Antonio Margarito had agreed to face Miguel Cotto on June 9th at the Madison Square Garden.
But I’ve been told by sources that that’s not completely true and there is still a chance that he could still be making his mandatory defense against Paul Williams.
But who’s Paul Williams, again?
APRIL FOOLIN?
Bob Arum still insists that Manny Pacquiao is a go for April 28th against In-Jin Chi but what’s not clear is just who will train him with Freddie Roach cutting out to Puerto Rico beginning March 1st to work with Oscar De La Hoya.
“I have no idea,” was Arum’s reply, when asked who would train the ‘Pac Man’. “I haven’t talked to him about it and I intend to do that.”
As for the possibility of Pacquiao going to Puerto Rico and being side by side with ‘the Golden Boy’, Arum stated, “He’s not going to Puerto Rico, he definitely wont.”
FINAL FLURRIES
OK, is it clear that it’s time for Zuri Lawrence to walk away from boxing? I don’t think his chin has recovered from Cal Brock?s left hook last summer…Just my opinion, I thought Francisco Lorenzo beat Roman Martinez on Telefutura…..Timothy Bradley looked improved in beating Manuel Garnica over eight on ShoBox. I still think he has a lot of rough edges to polish up though. But he’s young….. James Kirkland looked like a real grinder but I’d like to see him in there with a more potent threat…..Vicente Escobedo got some more rounds under his belt in decisioning Tiger Smalls over ten on Thursday night….The Contender brass is said to be none too happy with Roach not being able to work or travel across the pond for Peter Manfredo Jr’s bout with Joe Calzaghe in early April…..I think Luis Collazo is a live, live dog against Shane Mosley next Saturday night….I have no problems with a Bernard Hopkins-Winky Wright face-off. It’s not the first bout I’d choose in a lineup, but still, it’s two future Hall-of-Famers. However, I do object to it being on pay-per-view instead of regular HBO…..And finally, can we give it up to my all-time favorite Miami Hurricane, Michael Jerome Irvin aka ‘the Playmaker’ for his induction into the Pro Football Hall-of-Fame? I can still see him streaking down the field at Doak Campbell Stadium in October of 1987 against Florida State to put Miami on top of the Noles 26-19 (in an eventual heart-stopping 26-25 win that catapulted the Canes to their second national title) in what was one of the most clutch performances I have ever witnessed. Oh, yeah, there were the three Super Bowl rings he won in Dallas, also….Now, lets do the right thing and get Art Monk and Andre Reed in Canton, Ohio.
