De La Hoya: Canelo-Chavez buys over 1 million

According to Dan Rafael at ESPN, Golden Boy’s Oscar De La Hoya says that the May 6 HBO pay-per-view fight between Canelo Alvarez and Julio Cesar Chavez Jr drew “way over a million” buys, and that an official announcement likely will be made today.

Canelo won a boring fight going away, sweeping all scorecards with a decision win over 120-108 across the board.

The fight obviously sold well, and would be the first boxing fight since Mayweather-Pacquiao shattered every revenue record in 2015 to top the one million buys mark. This, of course, was the hope with matching Canelo and Chavez — not that it would actually be a great fight, but that it would engage the Mexican fan base to a degree that it would be a substantial financial hit. De La Hoya bet on that fan base, and it appears to have been a very smart bet.

What will be perhaps more interesting is whether or not Alvarez and Gennady Golovkin can do the same on September 16. Golovkin has pretty much been a dud on pay-per-view thus far, drawing 150,000 buys for his 2015 fight with David Lemieux, and 170,000 in March for his fight with Daniel Jacobs.

But as an actual fight, Canelo-GGG is more marketable to perhaps a wider base than Canelo-Chavez. Mexican fans will still be engaged via Canelo — and the fact that Golovkin seems very popular with that fan base, as well — and the fight will be promoted heavily through ESPN streams, both on TV and social media.

Do you think we’ll see a million buys again in September?