Manny Pacquiao-Floyd Mayweather may not have lived up to the hype in the ring. It did on the accountant’s ledger.
The Fight of the Century shattered pay-per view and live gate records.
The box office collected $72,198,500 off the sale of 16,219 tickets, according to ESPN’s Dan Rafael. This represents a take about 350 percent of what Canelo Alvarez-Floyd Mayweather grabbed from the live audience in September 2013. In other words, more than $50 million separated the current record holder from its predecessor.
Rafael reports nine unsold tickets and just 46 comps for lucky fans.
The pay-per-view numbers similarly dwarfed the previous record holder, Oscar De La Hoya-Floyd Mayweather, which attracted nearly 2.5 million buys. Rafael reports that preliminary numbers suggest 4.4 million buys. The figure astounds all the more because of the documented problems of various cable companies in fulfilling orders and the astronomical price of the fight. The $90 subscription, $100 in HD, amounted to $35-$45 more than the cost of the previous record holder.
The fight, despite exciting flurries by Pacquiao in the fourth and sixth, resembled a chess match more than a boxing match. Mayweather danced, pot-shotted, and shoulder-rolled to a unanimous-decision victory.
Few call Floyd Mayweather exciting. Many call him “Money.”
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