By Keith Idec
Bob Arum considers airing the Manny Pacquiao-Jeff Horn fight on ESPN a “gift” to boxing fans.
Pacquiao’s defense of the WBO welterweight title against Horn will be televised live by ESPN on Saturday night from Brisbane, Australia. A crowd of nearly 60,000 is expected to attend their scheduled 12-round fight at Suncorp Stadium in Brisbane, Horn’s hometown.
Arum had difficulty finding an American television partner for the Pacquiao-Horn bout, which Pacquiao (59-6-2, 38 KOs) is heavily favored to win. The 29-year-old Horn (16-0-1, 11 KOs) is the WBO’s No. 1-ranked contender at 147 pounds, but the 2012 Olympian hasn’t beaten a legitimate welterweight contender since he turned pro in March 2013 and is completely unknown among American boxing fans.
Airing Pacquiao-Horn on ESPN will expose Pacquiao to a larger audience than usual, though, because the basic-cable channel is available in millions more homes than HBO and the fight won’t cost $65-$75 to watch in HD via pay-per-view. The Pacquiao-Horn fight will headline a telecast set to start at 9 p.m. ET/6 p.m. PT and will kick off a new television partnership between Arum’s promotional company, Top Rank Inc., and ESPN.
“This is the first fight that Manny’s had that’s been on free-to-air television, thanks to ESPN,” Arum said during a recent episode of ESPN’s “First Take” series. “He hasn’t had a fight in 11 years that people hadn’t paid for. His last fight was on HBO 11 years ago. So this is an opportunity for the public to get reacquainted with Manny Pacquiao. And they’ll have a tremendous, tremendous audience on July 1st. And he’s fighting a really good, tough kid in Jeff Horn.”
The last fight for the 38-year-old Pacquiao that wasn’t broadcast on pay-per-view was his sixth-round stoppage of Hector Velazquez in September 2005. HBO televised the Pacquiao-Velazquez fight from Staples Center in Los Angeles.
Assuming Pacquiao, a 6-1 favorite, defeats Horn, Arum expects Pacquiao to return to the pay-per-view platform for a fight sometime in November.
“Now if he beats Horn and if he looks good beating Horn, then, down the road, there’s Terence Crawford, there’s [Errol] Spence,” Arum said. “He will go into those fights. But those fights become very, very expensive and we can’t do them on free television. We have to do them on pay-per-view in order to pay the fighters what the fighters would want in a fight like that.
“This fight, because of the Brisbane Tourist Board, because of Queensland Tourist minister, we are being subsidized by the government in Australia. There’ll be close to 60,000 people in attendance and we therefore could afford to show this fight as a July Fourth weekend gift, thanks to ESPN and Manny Pacquiao.”
Keith Idec is a senior writer/columnist for BoxingScene.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing.