pacman vs hatton generated tons of money

[Guest baseball25]

Live gate: $8,832,950. Tickets sold: 15,368. Comps: 561. Closed circuit gate: $575,750. Closed circuit tickets 11,515 (11 locations). Not bad at all.

So in Vegas alone just for tickets or closed circuit the fight generated about $9.4 million. Sure, boxing's dead. So, for anybody that thinks boxing is dead than there on crack.....

There saying this Pview did a million plus buys

[silentassasin]

The reason why people say it is dead is because unlike the UFC and other MMA organizations, boxing promoters have shied away from the heyday of the 1980's mentality of pitting the best fighters together. Most of the recent fights are not that great as far as matchups. I grew up loving boxing and still like it but it is not as exciting as MMA and even on a bad card of UFC fights you still get to see more fights for your $50 bucks than most boxing PPV's.

Just my two cents worth. If more boxing promotors would put show together like this one boxing can and will be coming back stronger.

[Guest baseball25]

Boxing is still strong man.....Mayweather vs Marquez will do big money and the winner of that will face pac man....than cotto vs mosely will do alot again......I mean look how much money hatton vs mayweather did and oscar vs mayweahter.....If boxing was a dying sport than they wouldn't make the money they did last weekend in vegas..I totally agree with you about MMA having better cards.....But if your a true boxing fan it doesn't get much better than mayweather vs marquez.the winner face pacman......Cotto vs Mosley are cotto vs pacman.....those fights make big time money...

[JoshD]

The people and writers who think boxing is dead know nothing about the sport.

That's like saying soccer(the biggest sport in the world) is dead

Boxing is far from dead.

Don't believe me?

Then why did Haye-Klitschko sale 30,000 tickets in ONE DAY for their fight in June?  They are expected to sell out a venue of 60,000!

not bad for a dead sport eh??

[silentassasin]

I am not saying that it is dead but it is not nearly as strong as it was 20 years ago.

I am 38 and can remember back when I was a kid even my mom would watch when Hagler or Leonard or Tyson, the list goes on, would fight. You got much more for you buck not to mention that the big fights were on cable like HBO and not PPV. I remember watching Larry Holmes fight on more than one occasion on TV before PPV ever started being the major venue.

MMA is the fastest growing spectator sport in the world. It is inevitable that people are going to compare it and its popularity now to boxing which is its closest competitor. Stop using the soccer crap as an arguement. The majority of the people here in the states that pay attention to it are either Latino or immigrants from places in the world where it is played more and has been a part of the landscape forever. But here in the USA it is not followed by thte majority of the sports fans, does not make it a bad sport but just a boring one. I for one am a fan of the athleticism it takes to play it but would rather see football or basketball. Soccer is just like Hockey, the biggest matchup in the last few years only got a very minimal rating on Versus last week and it had the two biggest stars in the game. A rerun of any sitcom gets the same rating as that series did.

Boxing is great but I repeat what I said earlier. MMA fight cards will have anywhere from 5-10 fights being seen for the same price that you get one or maybe two boxing matches. The MMA fighters are always way more accesible to the fans than boxers are now. I am not saying that if a good fight is coming on that I would not watch boxing but MMA is a better product right now

[Guest baseball25]

Pacquiao-Hatton PPV numbers something to celebrate

For the past two weeks I've been asked constantly about the pay-per-view numbers for the May 2 Manny Pacquiao-Ricky Hatton fight, boxing's biggest fight of the year so far.

The eagerly anticipated showdown was promoted wonderfully. There was great buzz all week in Las Vegas and an electric atmosphere inside the MGM Grand Garden Arena on fight night, not to mention a spectacular second-round knockout victory for Pacquiao.

However, the period at the end of the sentence -- the pay-per-view buys -- has been missing because Top Rank promoter Bob Arum, who co-promoted the event with Golden Boy Promotions, refuses to disclose the figures for reasons that are beyond me.

He sure gave me an earful about it this week while dropping several words that wouldn't be appropriate for an ESPN.com blog. In the one statement he made that I can quote, he said (loudly), "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."

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.

That means the fight generated almost $50 million from the American pay-per-view, a huge number that doesn't even take into account the pay-per-view figures from Hatton's turf in the United Kingdom, where the fight easily could have done 1 million buys. Nor does it take into account the live gate of $8,832,950 or the closed-circuit ticket sales of $575,750 in Las Vegas alone. There's also a pile of cash from the rest of the closed-circuit and international television sales, a seven-figure license fee from HBO for the delayed broadcast rights, sponsorship money and merchandise revenue.

How big was Pacquiao-Hatton? If you take away heavyweight pay-per-views involving Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield as well as the Oscar De La Hoya fights, it's the second-best ever. Only Floyd Mayweather Jr.'s victory against Hatton in December 2007 did more business, generating 915,000 domestic buys.

The bottom line is that Pacquiao-Hatton was a massive success, something Arum should be proud of instead of trying to hide, especially because this was the first big fight of the post-De La Hoya era. I stopped trying to figure Arum out a long time ago, but his decision on this topic makes no sense.

At a time when many have questioned what would become of the boxing business in the wake of the retirement of De La Hoya, the all-time pay-per-view king, Pacquiao-Hatton answered the question with an emphatic, "Yes, there is still life in this business."

When a 140-pound fight in which neither participant is American can do a number like 850,000, especially in the midst of a brutal recession, it's celebration time. And it's not the end, either. A whole series of fights involving Pacquiao and Mayweather can get the public excited and generate big numbers. With Mayweather out of retirement and set to face Juan Manuel Marquez on July 18, you can bank on another fight that will generate in the 500,000-buy range. And, eventually, when Pacquiao and Mayweather finally meet in the fight the public is already demanding, I believe it may rise into the 1.5 million-buy stratosphere.

Golden Boy CEO Richard Schaefer and HBO PPV chief Mark Taffet acquiesced to Arum's insistence that official numbers not be released on Pacquiao-Hatton, but neither of them is happy about it. I don't blame them. They want to talk up their success, not be muzzled.

So without disclosing the figures, Taffet did say, "Pacquiao-Hatton was a true megafight and establishes Manny Pacquiao as a true pay-per-view star. Most importantly, with Pacquiao-Hatton, Mayweather-Marquez and the great possibilities of matchups in the 140- and 147-pound divisions, we are entering a very exciting period for boxing fans and the sport."

Taffet is right, even if that wacky Arum doesn't want to acknowledge it with facts and figures.

[JoshD]

I am not saying that it is dead but it is not nearly as strong as it was 20 years ago.

I am 38 and can remember back when I was a kid even my mom would watch when Hagler or Leonard or Tyson, the list goes on, would fight. You got much more for you buck not to mention that the big fights were on cable like HBO and not PPV. I remember watching Larry Holmes fight on more than one occasion on TV before PPV ever started being the major venue.

MMA is the fastest growing spectator sport in the world. It is inevitable that people are going to compare it and its popularity now to boxing which is its closest competitor. Stop using the soccer crap as an arguement. The majority of the people here in the states that pay attention to it are either Latino or immigrants from places in the world where it is played more and has been a part of the landscape forever. But here in the USA it is not followed by thte majority of the sports fans, does not make it a bad sport but just a boring one. I for one am a fan of the athleticism it takes to play it but would rather see football or basketball. Soccer is just like Hockey, the biggest matchup in the last few years only got a very minimal rating on Versus last week and it had the two biggest stars in the game. A rerun of any sitcom gets the same rating as that series did.

Boxing is great but I repeat what I said earlier. MMA fight cards will have anywhere from 5-10 fights being seen for the same price that you get one or maybe two boxing matches. The MMA fighters are always way more accesible to the fans than boxers are now. I am not saying that if a good fight is coming on that I would not watch boxing but MMA is a better product right now

You're definitely entitled to your opinions but just because you think soccer is boring doesn't change the fact that the rest of the world doesn't think so.

As far as mma vs boxing in my opinion they are totally different and shouldn't be compared.  It's like comparing apples to oranges or football to baseball.

Personally, I enjoy both, but the best boxing matches blow the best mma matches out of the water in my opinion.

Sure, boxing might be less popular today, but if you think about it a lot of things have become less popular due to more choices, channels, etc.

Baseball has declined in popularity in recent years.  So whats next? IS BASEBALL DEAD ???

[Guest baseball25]

I am with you Josh D.......if there is a awesome mma card and A great boxing match on at the sametime.....I am going to watch the boxing over the MMA.........you can't compare the two.......Boxing is a science...you have to understand yeah this fight might be boring but you also know its the 2 best boxer that are fighting in the world.......just like BHOP nobody likes him becasue they feel he's boring but the guy conqueur the science of boxing knows every trick in the sport and thats why I love him.........I like mma and I never miss a pview...but if mayweather vs pacman was on the same night of lesnar and MIR........I would watch the mayweather and pacman fight....if cotto vs mayweather/pacman was on then i would still watch boxing, same goes for if it was mosley etc you get my drift..

[silentassasin]

Boxing and MMA are not apples and oranges because of the fact that both of them are combat sports. I am not saying that the fight did not generate more money that a UFC event will. But as far as boxing being a science, if you are insinuating that MMA is not then you are wrong. I am a former wrestler and I can tell you for a fact that MMA is as much of a science as boxing.

I can also tell you that, in my opinion, that just because lots of people paid for the fights does not make boxing great. Plenty of people pay to go to NASCAR events and that still does not make it great. It makes it great for NASCAR fans. This fight generated lots of support for people who love boxing and that is great for them. Most truly intelligent MMA fans like myself do not discount boxing as it is one of the components of MMA and a very important one. But I for one am talking about MMA being better than boxing for the fact that the fights generate more "water cooler" talk where I am than boxing does. I mean I can tell you for one thing, that next weekend's fights between Serra and Hughes will get talked about by my friends more than Pacman and Hatton did.

As far as soccer goes, like I said the guys are athletes no doubt but it is still boring to watch. Yes I have been to live games and seen them on tv and they are boring. Does not mean I begrudge people who like it. I just don't want to watch it. Another big reason why I think that boxing is not followed by the younger crowd like it was when I was a kid is that there are not enough dominating Americans in boxing anymore. Tyson was a freak but he was captivating to watch. People would tune in to see if he could knock out an opponent faster than the previous time. Holmes, Ali, Frazier and Foreman all had major battles in the rings. AS did the smaller fighters like Leonard, Hagler and Hearns and Duran. But in the heyday of my youth there were many more great name boxers. The same can be said for MMA right now, there are so many good name fighters in the MMA organizations. But for whatever reason, could be that I have been into the martial arts most of my life, I enjoy watching the guys from other countries also like Machido and GSP.

Did not mean to give any impression of disrespect to boxing or apparently the soccer guys on here so I apologize if what I wrote was taken wrong.