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By Lyle Fitzsimmons - For an instant, I was back in San Antonio.
Or maybe Washington, New York, Los Angeles… or the other six cities on the nine-day itinerary of Showtime’s made-for-publicity Mayweather-Alvarez press tour in late June and early July.
Back then, as the fighters, their traveling parties and other dutiful laborers worked their way to and from venues in time zones across the U.S. and Mexico, the goal was to generate a palpable baseline of chatter for the fight that would carry until the final hard sell began in mid-August.
If the number of message-board posts typically generated by any mention of the match in the mean time is indicative, the early buzz had some staying power. So, when this past Saturday arrived and Showtime finally unveiled its initial installment of “All Access,” the suits in Manhattan had to be pleased.
The homestretch is here, and the pay-per-view brass ring – in this case, the 2.4 million buys generated by Mayweather and arch nemesis Oscar De La Hoya when they met six years ago – is within reach.
When I spoke to Showtime’s Stephen Espinoza at the Miami tour stop and asked if this was the main event to challenge for the all-time title, he played it particularly close to the vest – lauding the past fight’s assets and pointing out myriad factors that make it difficult to reproduce such fervor these days.
“It’s hard to predict where we’ll end up,” he said. “De La Hoya/Mayweather was a perfect storm. Oscar was at the peak. Floyd was just starting to make a lot of noise. You had the perfect good guy/bad guy storyline. It’s hard to replicate that. That may be one of those numbers that isn’t approached again, because of the virtue of technology and the division of the audience’s attention and all kinds of things.”
Of course, the ante has been upped since that steamy day in South Florida. [Click Here To Read More]
Or maybe Washington, New York, Los Angeles… or the other six cities on the nine-day itinerary of Showtime’s made-for-publicity Mayweather-Alvarez press tour in late June and early July.
Back then, as the fighters, their traveling parties and other dutiful laborers worked their way to and from venues in time zones across the U.S. and Mexico, the goal was to generate a palpable baseline of chatter for the fight that would carry until the final hard sell began in mid-August.
If the number of message-board posts typically generated by any mention of the match in the mean time is indicative, the early buzz had some staying power. So, when this past Saturday arrived and Showtime finally unveiled its initial installment of “All Access,” the suits in Manhattan had to be pleased.
The homestretch is here, and the pay-per-view brass ring – in this case, the 2.4 million buys generated by Mayweather and arch nemesis Oscar De La Hoya when they met six years ago – is within reach.
When I spoke to Showtime’s Stephen Espinoza at the Miami tour stop and asked if this was the main event to challenge for the all-time title, he played it particularly close to the vest – lauding the past fight’s assets and pointing out myriad factors that make it difficult to reproduce such fervor these days.
“It’s hard to predict where we’ll end up,” he said. “De La Hoya/Mayweather was a perfect storm. Oscar was at the peak. Floyd was just starting to make a lot of noise. You had the perfect good guy/bad guy storyline. It’s hard to replicate that. That may be one of those numbers that isn’t approached again, because of the virtue of technology and the division of the audience’s attention and all kinds of things.”
Of course, the ante has been upped since that steamy day in South Florida. [Click Here To Read More]
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