Despite the best efforts of Major League Baseball to keep boxing off of the airwaves, more fans managed to tune in for the most recent Premier Boxing Champions (PBC) on FS1 telecast than was the case for either main event participant.
A late replacement, 29-year old Andy Ruiz (32-1, 21 KO) makes a quick turnaround from an April contest to find the biggest opportunity of his professional career. He has a chance to upset 29-year old British stadium phenom Anthony Joshua (22-0, 21 KO) in Joshua’s US debut at the Garden. Joshua isn’t just arriving with the WBA, IBF, and WBO belts.
Jr. lightweight has always been a division capable of memorable warfare and class boxing. Right now, it makes room in the title scene for a distance technician like Tevin Famer and a lights out puncher like Gervonta Davis.
Deontay Wilder didn’t leave much time to build an audience Saturday night, but his spectacular, one-punch, first-round knockout of Dominic Breazeale still drew Showtime’s highest viewership for boxing since his last appearance on the premium cable network.
SHOWTIME Sports original documentary series ALL ACCESS earned two Sports Emmy Awards on Tuesday night at the 40th Annual Sports Emmy Award ceremony in New York City. These were the fourth and fifth Emmys overall for the ALL ACCESS series, which debuted in 2013.
Pick It: TBRB #3 Deontay Wilder vs. Dominic Breazeale (Saturday, Showtime, 9 PM EST). On paper it’s not the best show in a loaded week but there is no denying what 33-year old WBC heavyweight titlist Deontay Wilder (40-0-1, 39 KO) brings to the table. Every professional foe has eventually been dropped or stopped.
The Miguel Berchelt-Francisco Vargas rematch drew a peak audience of over one million Saturday night. Nielsen Media Research revealed that ESPN’s broadcast of Berchelt’s technical-knockout victory over Vargas peaked at 1,099,000 viewers. Berchelt basically battered a faded Vargas until Vargas’ trainer, Joel Diaz, instructed referee Jay Nady to stop their scheduled 12-round, 130-pound title fight following the fifth round.
The memorable battle between Julian Williams and Jarrett Hurd drew substantially higher viewership than the previous “PBC on FOX” main event. A Nielsen Media Research report released Tuesday noted that a peak audience of 2,108,000 tuned in toward the end of the Williams-Hurd fight at EagleBank Arena in Fairfax, Virginia. The three-bout broadcast on FOX averaged 1,385,000 viewers over the course of nearly three hours.
DAZN doesn’t divulge its subscription numbers, but the emerging streaming service deemed the Canelo Alvarez-Daniel Jacobs fight a success Wednesday as best it could. A press release issued Wednesday afternoon by DAZN revealed that more than 1.2 million viewers watched the Alvarez-Jacobs bout live Saturday night from T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas. That figure includes subscribers from the eight markets in which DAZN is available – the United States, Austria, Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain and Switzerland.
With the ease in which Artur Beterbiev turned away the challenge of Radivoje ‘Hot Rod’ Kalajdzic, the stiffer competition—it seems—turned out to be the fight for viewership. The unbeaten light heavyweight titlist made his official debut as a Top Rank-exclusive boxer in his May 4 win over Kalajdzic at the Stockton Arena in Stockton, Calif. The title fight topped an ESPN tripleheader which produced a telecast average of 480,000 viewers according to Nielsen Media Research.