By Keith Idec
NEW YORK – If Lou DiBella’s vision for a full unification fight in the heavyweight division comes to fruition, Deontay Wilder would fight Anthony Joshua in a battle of unbeatens sometime in 2018.
If Alabama’s Wilder and England’s Joshua can continue winning, eventually own all four heavyweight titles and agree to meet to determine heavyweight supremacy, DiBella doesn’t think their fight should be televised via pay-per-view in the United States. A Joshua-Wilder showdown would be a pay-per-view event in the boxing-loving United Kingdom, where such shows typically cost consumers 20 pounds (about $25).
According to DiBella, the same principles don’t apply to the under-performing pay-per-view market in the United States.
“If anyone’s paying attention, pay-per-view is fading,” DiBella said. “It’s dying. There hasn’t been a major pay-per-view with big numbers, truthfully, since Mayweather against Pacquiao [4.6 million buys in May 2015]. That’s a fact. Even the Canelo fights, the numbers were grossly inflated. And I don’t think any of them broke 500,000 buys. And in fact, I know they didn’t.
“So do I think [Joshua-Wilder is] pay-per-view? No. I think pay-per-view is counterintuitive for a big fight. I think that fewer eyeballs see it. The reason you’re asking this question is because Eddie Hearn [Joshua’s promoter] went out there and said that Deontay’s gotta be built better so that it’s a pay-per-view fight. Go f*ck yourself. We fought Eric Molina on [Showtime]. After Eric Molina lost to Deontay Wilder, they put him on pay-per-view. I’m not saying that’s not OK. If people over in the UK wanna pay big money every time out, to pay for Joshua, it’s their business. But more people saw Deontay Wilder’s last fight on free TV than all of the pay-per-views [of Joshua]. … But do I think Deontay and Joshua belongs on pay-per-view over here? No I really don’t, actually. I think it belongs on broadcast television.”
Wilder (37-0, 36 KOs), the WBC heavyweight champion, will return to broadcast television February 25 against Gerald Washington (18-0-1, 12 KOs). Their scheduled 12-round fight will be broadcast on free TV (FOX) from Legacy Arena in Birmingham, Alabama.
Wilder’s last fight, a technical knockout defeat of Chris Arreola, also was broadcast by FOX from Birmingham on July 16 and drew an average viewership of 2.54 million.
“Another interesting thing, FOX did that fight between Arreola and Deontay,” DiBella said. “And if you look at the numbers from that fight, there has never in the history of boxing been a [heavyweight] pay-per-view that did more households than tuned in to Deontay Wilder-Chris Arreola, including Tyson and Lewis. So that tells you something about pay-per-view.
“Now that being said, when pay-per-view – and it really was TVKO and the whole HBO thing years ago, in like 1990, that really started the proliferation of pay-per-view – I was one of the architects of that with Seth Abraham and [Mark] Taffet and [Bob] Arum and at the time Dan Duva, to a lesser extent [Don] King. There were reasons for that back then, too. Even HBO’s budget back then was bigger than budgets are now, [but] there were limitations to what you could pay for an event. Foreman-Holyfield was the first big event on pay-per-view, real big one, and it did [1.4 million] homes [in April 1991]. That’s a big number. That’s a sh*tload of money.”
The most lucrative heavyweight pay-per-view event in boxing history was Lennox Lewis’ knockout of Mike Tyson in June 2002 in Memphis, Tennessee.
That show drew approximately 1.95 million buys, less than the Tyson-Evander Holyfield rematch in June 1997 (around 1.99 million buys). It still made more money in pay-per-view revenue – an estimated $112 million, nearly $12 million more than the Holyfield-Tyson rematch.
Meanwhile, Joshua (18-0, 18 KOs), the IBF heavyweight champion, is preparing for a career-defining fight against former champion Wladimir Klitschko (64-4, 53 KOs) on April 29 at Wembley Stadium in London.
Keith Idec is a senior writer/columnist for BoxingScene.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing.
