Richard Schaefer says Mayweather-Marquez PPV buys are "through the roof"

There's still no official word from HBO, Golden Boy, or anyone else, but Richard Schaefer told The Ring's Michael Rosenthal that pay-per-view buys for last Saturday's Mayweather-Marquez fight are "through the roof."

"Through the roof," he said, referring to the numbers. "I’m hearing through the roof. I don’t want to announce anything. When I announce it, I want to be able to fully stand behind it. It’s big, very big. A lot of people didn’t believe us. Maybe I’ve gained a little credibility with my predictions.

"Most importantly, I hope the world realizes when we release these numbers that Floyd Mayweather, love him or hate him, is today, without any question, no ifs, ands or buts, the No. 1 pay-per-view star in the world. No question about it."

This comes right on the heels of the official gate numbers, which must have been less of a thrill for everyone involved.

Schaefer, Oscar de la Hoya and HBO (via their Twitter page, anyway) all predicted before the fight that the show would do one million buys, a number laughed at by many, even those planning to order.

We did a poll for fun before the fight, and of the 277 votes we tallied, 151 people (55%) said it would come in somewhere between 400,000 and 699,000 buys. Only 16 votes (6%) went to the "1,000,000 or more" option.

The success of this PPV -- and it's looking more and more likely now that it was, in fact, a huge PPV success -- really surprises just about everyone in or around boxing, from fans to media to I think, deep down, even a lot of the people involved with the promotion. I predicted 550K personally, and the highest I thought it could go with the late-week surge in interest that really stunned me, to be honest, was 750-800K. That there's even talk of a million buys is still shocking.