By Steve Kim
On the night of April 18th in Vernona, New York at the Turning Stone Resort, Ruslan Provodnikov and Lucas Matthysse do battle in what is perhaps the best pure match-up on paper for the first half of 2015( with all due respect to what's taking place on May 2nd). And Artie Pelullo, who's company Banner Promotions handles Provodnikov, is expecting a full house that night.
"Ringside was sold-out within the first two hours, second and third levels there's only a hundred tickets as off six o'clock tonight," said Pelullo on late Thursday evening. "And they have fifty percent of the lowest tickets still available and they think they'll be sold-out within a couple of days with all the tickets."
Not only is this an enticing match-up, but tickets went for $75, $50, $35 and $25.
"Verona, The Turning Stone, priced the tickets in such a manner that everybody can show up. So they will sell the 5,000 seats before the end of the week, in my opinion."
Banner and Golden Boy Promotions is doing their best to make lemonade with the lemons they were dealt after being boxed out of the StubHub Center in Carson, California, their preferred destination for this fight.
Pelullo told BoxingScene.com - "Listen, Verona, New York, is a great location to do boxing, the casino people are real professionals and while we wanted to be on the West Coast we thought that was the best location but because the sites were blocked to us, other promoters who were just holding the dates and not doing fights on the date, I picked up the phone and talked to the people at Verona and they jumped on the opportunity to get Matthysse-Provodnikov. So sometimes you have to think that sometimes in life things just work out for the best.
"It's going to have 5,000 people there, 10,000 people in the casino, the food, the beverage, the gaming, everything will be up and it turned out to be the right location and we're going to get a lot of media coverage."
April 18th will be a busy one for boxing, as HBO has a split-site doubleheader (which includes this bout) and Showtime has a card that evening.
"On that night there are three fights, there's (Julio Cesar) Chavez Jr-(Andrzej) Fonfara and then there's (Terrence) Crawford and (Thomas) Dulorme and then there's what everyone thinks is the Fight of the Year in Provodnikov-Matthysse. So I think we'll be OK."
Steve Kim is the news editor for BoxingScene.com.
ADD COMMENT VIEW COMMENTS (26)