So, about that Pacquiao-Hatton buyrate...

Just over a week ago, Bob Arum was speculating that the domestic buys for Manny Pacquiao's two-round destruction of Ricky Hatton on May 2 would be between 1.6 and two million homes.

It didn't even occur to me until this morning when Bloody Elbow's MIchael Rome asked me if I'd heard anything new that I realized it had, in fact, been a week since Arum made that bold prediction.

HBO has released no official number. When the number is good -- or in this case, supposedly huge -- HBO comes out with the number within a week usually.

So what's the holdup?

We can now assume that Arum's 1.6-2 million estimate is way off. Maybe it's not, and I say now I am merely speculating. The Bobfather has a long history of going crazy with business estimates (this is the promoter that tries to sell you on Pacquiao-Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. being bigger than Pacquiao-Mayweather, remember), so it wouldn't be surprising. Nor could you truly fault an excited, jubilant promoter from getting a little nutty after he just watched the best fighter in his stable wreck a top superstar.

Honestly, I hope we're both wrong. I hope 10 million people bought the show. My initial estimate was 850-900K, that's what I was guessing before the fight. Even after Arum started talking big, realistically in my own mind I wasn't looking for more than 1.3 million or so, which would have slightly beaten Pacquiao's December fight with Oscar de la Hoya.

The number will come out whether they want it to or not, of course. The massive failures of Pavlik-Hopkins (195K) and Calzaghe-Jones (225K) couldn't be kept under wraps. But it's worth speculating now: What's the real number?