FanPost

Rafael: Pacquiao-Hatton did about 825-850K domestically

FanShot promoted by SC

I don't know if anyone else posted or addressed this, but Dan Rafael, in his blog, mentioned that Arum wants to keep it under wraps:

For whatever reason, Arum doesn't want to give them out, nor will he allow his partners at Golden Boy or HBO PPV to disclose them. What does he have to hide, anyway?

However, being a resourceful kind of guy with pretty darn good sources in the boxing business and television industry, I got the number, Arum's secrecy be damned. From what my sources tell me, the fight sits at about 825,000 domestic pay-per-view buys with the likelihood that when they're all counted, the total will reach 850,000 or more.

Arum's tactics seem, to me at least, to be a move in fear of giving Floyd any leverage on possible future neogotiations, saying that his fight with Hatton did better, etc.

[The rest is from SC, making this a collaborative piece!]

I think my favorite part here is this quote from Arum: "We did very well. Everyone involved in this event did a good job, but it's nobody's business what the numbers are but ours and the fighters. I'm not gonna release the figures."

In other words, "F*** me, this wasn't the 'record-breaker' I made it out to be and now I look like a dope, so shut up and leave me alone about it!"

The fact is 825-850,000 domestic buys is a remarkable number. As Rafael notes, it is the second-biggest boxing PPV ever that did not have Mike Tyson, Oscar de la Hoya or Evander Holyfield (behind the 915K that Mayweather-Hatton did).

Rafael also says that Richard Schaefer of Golden Boy and HBO's Mark Taffet are going along with Arum's bizarre request to not release the numbers and neither are thrilled about it. Schaefer, who co-promotes Hatton, and HBO must be thrilled with the number, while Arum talks Pacquiao up as if overnight he became Muhammad Ali mixed with Oscar de la Hoya and probably finds it hard to swallow the fact that not every single person on earth was terribly captivated by his eight-round whipping of an old-looking de la Hoya in December. Ask casual fans that watched that fight what they saw -- it's often a lot different than what "we" saw.

Pacquiao is the Top Rank meal ticket, but no matter how successful he is, when you combine a lot of factors (one of which is the recession), he's not going to be Oscar de la Hoya on PPV, at least not immediately, and I think this might bother Arum a little bit. The speculation that he might've wanted to use the Manny-Ricky number to leverage Floyd could also be true.

But he has to realize something else: All Pacquiao did was raise his profile as a "can't miss" fighter with the Hatton bombing. And another thing: He's not going to leverage Mayweather, who promotes himself and like it or not (and I don't, really, because it possibly prevents great fights) he's damn savvy enough to know that they need him for X fight or Y fight. The truth is, if Arum, Pacquiao and Roach want Floyd bad enough, they'll have to back down a little when negotiation time comes.

I say congratulations to Top Rank, Golden Boy, HBO, Manny Pacquiao and Ricky Hatton on the great success of this fight, because they deserve it. Sorry, Bobbo.

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