De La Hoya-Pacquiao pay-per-view could be 'home run'
By J. Michael Falgoust, USA TODAY
This isn't an election, but early returns look promising for Saturday night's showdown between Oscar De La Hoya and Manny Pacquiao (HBO Pay-Per-View, 9 p.m. ET).
Based on early reports from cable companies and DirecTV and Dish Network, the scheduled 12-round welterweight bout could get as many as two million buys, according to Bob Arum, chairman of Top Rank, Inc., the event's co-promoter, said Thursday.
When De La Hoya fought Floyd Mayweather last year, that fight did 2.4 million buys. Buys for this weekend's fight in California are tracking at 90% of what estimates showed for De La Hoya-Mayweather.
"Will that hold for the country? It's like an election. Who the hell knows?" Arum said. "But we know based on those early numbers and based on experience the event will perform extremely well. If I had to guess, anywhere between 1.6 million and two million homes, which is a home run."
Such projections are surprising because of how poorly the last two HBO PPV shows did. The Oct. 18 matchup with Bernard Hopkins vs. Kelly Pavlik as well as the Nov. 8 meeting between Roy Jones and Joe Calzaghe did less than 250,000 buys.
The last time De La Hoya didn't reach that threshold in his 18 appearances on pay TV, he was just five years into his career. The fewest buys he's ever generated was 220,000, when he was a lightweight, in 1995.
"People wanted to see him fight, and still want to see him fight. Once De La Hoya is in a fight, all the media come together and treat it as a major event," said Arum, who helped build De La Hoya into an attraction before the fighter left to start his own company, Golden Boy Promotions.
"ESPN does round-the-clock coverage. They don't do that for regular fights. Women become interested. Women generally aren't interested at all... Oscar broadens the universe. He brings in people in a similar way Mike Tyson brought people in. De La Hoya does it in a different way and reaches different demographic groups. He's the one guy in boxing who reaches out to Anglo women. That, to me, is unbelievable. We worked on it, but to see it come to this kind of fruition is something I never would've expected."
LoL that would MORE THAN DOUBLE lesnar/couture which was billed as "the biggest fight in UFC history"
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