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Pacquiao vs Bradley II: Bob Arum says fans don't care about PPV undercards

Bob Arum has said again what he's said before: PPV undercards just don't matter, and that's why he doesn't put special effort into including big fights.

Ethan Miller

Speaking with Kevin Iole of Yahoo! Sports, Bob Arum repeated something that he's said in the past, and something that has been a common belief in the boxing business for a long time: no matter how much hardcore boxing fans complain about weak pay-per-view undercards, it just doesn't have any impact on the business performance of the PPVs.

Speaking specifically about the just-announced Pacquiao-Bradley II undercard for April 12, Arum had this to say:

"In theory, yes, it makes sense to say, let's go get a lot of good, interesting fights and put them on the undercard, but the truth is - and I've been doing this a long, long time - 90 percent of the people don't want to see the undercard and don't care about it. But there is a point to the argument that we should give the other 10 percent something to watch that they'll enjoy, so we decided to try to put together a fun card for them."

The last Top Rank and HBO pay-per-view effort from November was Pacquiao-Rios, which did disappointing sales of "about 500,000," which some suspect might be a bit of an exaggeration. But Arum is right -- the main event sells the pay-per-view, not the undercard.

As an aside, that's why I think Golden Boy and Showtime deserve further credit for putting good fights on pay-per-view undercards (there's usually at least one perfectly good fight on their shows lately) -- that's why I refer to stuff like Garcia-Matthysse or Ponce De Leon-Mares as "gifts" to dedicated fans, because there's really no serious upside, business-wise, to putting those fights on a PPV undercard. Mayweather-Canelo would have sold the way it did without Garcia-Matthysse, and Pacquiao-Rios would have sold the way it did even if there were another good fight on the show.

Personally, I don't think the Pacquiao-Bradley II show is that bad. There should be some decent action there, even if nothing is particularly significant.

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