Manny Pacquiao and Bob Arum will have plenty to celebrate with their latest PPV success. Early indicators have the fight between 1 and 1.5 million buys. (AP Photo/Eric Jamison)

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Ronnie Nathanielsz reports that promoter Bob Arum is confident that the Saturday mega fight between Miguel Cotto and Manny Pacquiao may have done upwards of 1.5 million buys on pay-per-view, and that 1 million is almost a certainty.

Arum said he had "pretty much the final numbers" for Puerto Rico alone which he said "set a record" by surpassing the previous record of 80,000 for the Felix "Tito" Trinidad – Oscar De La Hoya fight. Arum said the Pacquiao-Cotto fight did a little bit more than 110,000.
 
Stating it was only a guess, Arum figured the fight would do around 1.3 million although he said there were no numbers from New York, Pennsylvania which are big points, adding that he didn’t even have any California numbers although he had the figures for San Diego and Hawaii "which were good numbers."

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Arum recalled that the Pacquiao-De La Hoya fight last December did 1.25 million and in the East "so far we are doing 40 percent better and in the West we are doing about 10 percent less."

The astute Top Rank promoter said "we are happy because we did well over a million homes and I think it will be closer to 1.5 million."

It's early, but it looks like this will probably wind up equaling or topping the Mayweather-Marquez show from September 19. Right now, Michael Marley of the Examiner has it at 1.6 million and counting, but that's just speculation like anything else right now, but another indicator that this fight is tracking amazingly well.