LAS VEGAS – The Pacquiao vs Sugar Share Mosley fight this Saturday at the MGM Grand Garden Arena is not only the biggest fight of the year so far but is also Pacquiao's biggest fight in terms of ticket sales and media coverage, this according to Top Rank publicist Lee Samuels.
“They're all cleaned up,” Samuels, resting at the MGM media center after the jampacked Pacquiao and Mosley grand entrance, told PhilBoxing referring to the tickets for the fight which was already almost sold out during the first three hours when the ticket sales opened last February. “All the seats of the arena are taken,” Samuels said. Aside from the the arena tickets, close circuit tickets are also on sale in hotels around Las Vegas and are selling like hot cakes.
Over at Team Pacquiao, they're in a quandary on how to accommodate all the ticket requests from Pacquiao's ever growing circle of friends and supporters. Many of Pacquiao's loyal Los Angeles-based well-wishers who never missed a Pacquiao fight were deprived of tickets for the fight this time around. Politicians and celebrities who had calendared a May 7 Las Vegas holiday to see the fight and who depended on Pacquiao for tickets may end up canceling their trips or viewing the fight on close circuit while in Las Vegas.
“There are 1,600 people on the list who will be given tickets [for free or otherwise] but we have only 1,000 tickets on hand,” a Pacquiao insider revealed. Normally, Top Rank, the promoter of this fight, will have plenty to spare at crunch time. But this time around even Top Rank has nothing left. I asked Top Rank's Ricardo Jimenez if he has one ticket to spare because a friend of mine had asked to buy one. “Oh, forget it,” was Jimenez quick response who in the past was able to accommodate our requests.
“This is also the biggest media coverage ever for a Pacquiao fight,” Samuels continued. “All the big media guys are here, even those those who don't usually cover boxing are here. We're having a hard time accommodating everyone. We have to reject more than 200 credential applications because there is no more space to accommodate them in the arena. This is even bigger than Pacquiao-De la Hoya fight.”
The promotional success of the Pacquiao-Mosley fight, who had been criticized by many boxing writers from its inception, could be attributed to several factors including introducing Pacquiao's success story into a new audience via CBS TV network, Paquiao's return to Las Vegas after a one and a half year absence where a weekend holiday to the sin city was a sought after affair during a Pacquiao event and Pacquiao's growing number of Mexican fans who want to spend their Cinco de Mayo holidays in Las Vegas. The Vazquez-Arce tussle and a Kelly Pavlik return on the undercard also helped.
The effect of all these factors to the success of the pay-per-view numbers to this event remains to be seen however and is the only the unknown variable in the equation coming to this Saturday's fight. Bob Arum is aiming for a record pay-per-view numbers for Pacquiao this time courtesy of CBS's over a hundred million subscribers. Pacquiao had logged more than a million PPV buys in three of his last four fights. The highest pay-per-view on record was the De La Hoya-Mayweather fight in 2007 at 2.4 million buys.
Asked if the Pacquiao-Mosley pay-per-view will also be successful, Samuels simply said: “I don't know.”
Source: PhilBoxing.com
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