Pacquiao-Clottey nearly a sellout

By Eric Thomas:The Dallas Cowboy stadium will likely be filled with at least 45,000 fans for the March 13th fight between World Boxing Organization welterweight champion Manny Pacquiao vs. Joshua Clottey. According to ESPN, the fight is nearing a sellout of 45,000. If it reaches that total, the stadium, which can hold 100,000 fans, will be reconfigured from 45,000 to a larger number to accommodate additional fans that might want to travel to Arlington, Texas to see the fight. Top Rank promoter Bob Arum says “Right now we’re on target to sell the 45,000 seats and we’ll be happy when we do that. We sold 35 tickets and are on target of doing that today.” Its unclear how many tickets have been sold at this time. Arum isn’t saying but he feels good about it reaching the 45,000 number by fight time on March 13th.That number is pretty phenomenal for a fight that appears to be a mismatch on paper. Clottey, a fighter who doesn’t typically throw a lot of punches and who is coming off a loss in his last fight against Miguel Cotto, isn’t well known to casual boxing fans. He also has few wins over top tier fighters during his career. Clottey has lost to two out of the four good top fighters that he’s faced during his career. Despite Clottey’s poor performance against top caliber opposition, the WBO has him ranked as the number #1 contender. This really speaks to the lack of quality talent in the welterweight division as a while right now at this time. There are just not too many good fighters in the division other than Floyd Mayweather Jr., Shane Mosley, Pacquiao and to a lesser extent Andre Berto and Clottey. The Pacquiao-Clottey fight could end up doing really well on Pay-Per-View as well, even if only Pacquiao’s diehard fans are the only ones that purchase tickets for the fight. Pacquiao has a lot of fans who don’t care who he fights and will gladly pay $49.95 to watch him fight. My guess is the fight will do at least a million buys from Pacquiao’s fans alone. Any extra casual fans who just want to see a good fight will tip this number higher by at least 200,000 to 400,000 more I’m betting.