There?s Floyd Mayweather. There?s Manny Pacquiao. And then there?s everyone else.
Among those in the everyone else category are Miguel Cotto and Sergio Marttinez.
The June 7 pay-per-view fight between Cotto and Martinez was supposed to generate big bucks. Cotto was fighting in New York?s Madison Square Garden, his home away from home, and on Puerto Rican Day weekend no less. Martinez, the lineal middleweight champion and one of boxing?s class acts, was supposed to attract fans based, at least in part, on his demolition of Julio Cesar Chavez Jr.
But fight fans are fickle. Instead of the anticipated 500,000 pay-per-view buys, Cotto-Martinez underperformed with 350,000 buys. It?s not peanuts, nor is it surprising considering the price gouging which PPV has come to symbolize. Another factor is that the fight, whatever its virtues going on, wasn?t pay-per-view worthy to begin with.
Cotto?s promoter, Top Rank chairman Bob Arum, told ESPN.com, ?The numbers were not great. All the numbers boxing has been getting on pay-per-view have been terrible. It?s not disappointing; it just is what it is. There are too many (pay-per-view cards).?
If Arum?s analysis is correct, one solution is to simply have fewer pay-per-view cards. It would be better for the fans. It would be better for boxing. It would not, however, be better for the promoter?s bottom line.
?Pay-per-view was always designed,? continued Arum, ?as was closed circuit back in the day, for true super fights, not just very good fights. There have been pay-per-views every month and people resent the fact that they?re asked to pay extra for anything halfway decent. Boxing pay-per-view numbers are down. Look at the numbers for the Mayweather and Pacquiao fights. The UFC pay-per-view numbers are also down.?
It could be that folks are catching on. It could be that the economy is in the toilet. One wouldn?t expect Bob Arum to be hip to how the other half lives, nor would one expect Lou DiBella, Martinez?s promoter, to be any hipper to that reality either.
?It?s well off the projections,? he said. ?It underperformed. HBO expected 460,000 to 500,000 and it did well under that.?
DiBella believes the underperformance had less to do with the quality of the fight, which failed to live up to expectations, than with horse racing and ice hockey. That?s possible if unlikely, since the connection between the three sports is tenuous at best.
?There were so many big events,? DiBella added. ?There was a lot of competition for eyeballs and the pay-per-view industry is suffering because people had a lot of other choices that they didn?t have to pay for.?
That is always the case and it hasn?t put a dent in Money Mayweather?s pocket. The real reason Cotto-Martinez underperformed has less to do with horses and ice-skates than with the two fighters who, however great, especially in their primes, perhaps were not, definitely are not, if the numbers are any indication, pay-per-view worthy.
If you think that pay-per-view is going away, however poor the response has been, it?s time to think again. Arum is planning another PPV event for Cotto in December at the Garden, this time against Timothy Bradley. We?ll have to wait and see if the numbers for that fight are any better, or end up being as bad as or even worse than Cotto-Martinez.
