By James Blears
The sky and then stratosphere is the limit for Pay Per View, but to reach it, we must break through a thus far shatterproof glass ceiling.
PPV and developing its concept, has generated billions in revenue, plus dramatically increased the take home pay of elite boxers and even a smattering of pin- striped executives…God forbid! A pyramid, or a trickle down factor? Yet, have we only just scratched the surface, and are we being too complacent? Surely the potential for the attraction through action, via “Excitemente,” exceeds several million punters per pop?
The largest PPV so far was the too long awaited, slightly stale around the edges Floyd Mayweather Jr Vs Manny Pacquiao in 2015, which attracted 4.6 million buys generating a revenue of four hundred million dollars. Then, a similar buy ratio for Floyd Vs Conor McGregor in 2017. Ideally, it takes at least a couple towering egos. As Marvin Gaye and Kim Weston sang: “It takes two baby.”
HBO´s best year was 2007, when they had 4.8 million buys which brought in two hundred and fifty five million dollars in sales. Starting in 1991, and by 2014, HBO, which has since retired from the fight fray, had generated 59.3 million buys, which adds up to 3.1 billion dollars revenue.
The undisputed PPV Star is Floyd Mayweather Jr, because during his undefeated fifty fight career, he enticed twenty four million buys adding up to 1.6 billion dollars!
In the whole wide world, there has to be more than a handful/fistful of million fans, who` d be willing to part with their hard earned cash, for a truly spectacular world title fight. They used to say that heavyweights are worth their weight in ticket stubs, but in recent years, the lighter weights have handsomely proved their marketability.
What about Leonard Vs Hearns 1. Or Hagler Vs Hearns. But, hold your horses. Have we gone far enough or ventured high enough in giving the fans a sufficiently generous helping of pre-fight hype that they crave? The thrill factor, to encourage and elicit them, in ever increasing droves to part with the biggest bucks?
Mike Tyson once said that boxing is still stuck in the spit and sawdust era of bums on benches and insufficient to get the circulation juices flowing in a pulsating build up to the really big fights… or in between one, while waiting for another, and he pointed to MMA for some promotion inspiration.
Boxing hasn`t moved with the times. It`s still figuratively mired in the pipe and slippers era, considering putting on a true spectacular, worthy of dipping into our pockets for. A to the fore, two and fro show, before the zenith highlight. The chance to win a mansion in Las Vegas, or a holiday in its Eastern twin of Macau, or a Ferrari. The be all and end all. ALL on one bejeweled night.
Wrestlemania built up story lines, often tongue in cheek feuds with panache and gaudy gauche, so that fans could feel part of it, party with it, identify and relate. Doesn`t need to be bile soaked snap and snarl, it can be fun, but it does have to involve character, flamboyance, story- telling, tale telling and some prior thought, rather than malice aforethought.
Two main and huge and necessary ingredients needed. Firstly, the proven performance brilliance of the two protagonists and seductive rather than glib eloquence of at least one of them. A benchmark has already been set.
Back in the close circuit television era prior to PPV, when fans paid for tickets viz theater viewings of the Big Fights, Rumble in the Jungle gathered in fifty million buys. While the Thrilla in Manila attracted, extracted plus collected one hundred million! OK, the sums paid were proportionally less, adding up to about as much as going to the movies. But the real point to glean, in what it would mean, is that those amount of people were prepared to shell out!
There are some great fighters around today, but few who match the meteor/comet like unique brilliance of Muhammad Ali`s character. Unique, in the three hundred years of the modern boxing era. We can only marvel and hope beyond hope, for someone who might come along one fine day, with the capacity of being within comparable distance of The Greatest.
On another horizon of the landscape, a gamut of menace, thrills, spills, and delivery capacity from the fists of: “The Baddest man on the Planet,” Mike Tyson, who was the master blaster of his era. He was a born boon as well as a force of nature BOOM for boxing. We so need the superstar ingredient.
Will the coming greatness emerge from the Orient? Bruce Lee was revered in his time and Manny Pacquiao in his. We are told that China has a population of 1.4 billion people, and a rapidly emerging middle class. Would they be prepared to pay a proportion of their expandable and expendable income on decadent Occidental extravagance, namely a boxing opulence?
To create this, would require an even more sophisticated, complex, comprehensive, innovative all pervasive publicity and promotion campaign machine. Starting with the velvety starlet, fresh from the cradle of Olympic triumph, gathered up, nurtured and propelled by a MGM type LB charm offensive coupled with talk shows, promotional appearances, film bit parts…but so much earlier.
Also, why not literally take it to the next level? If William Shatner at his age can boldly go where no film star has ever gone, why can`t there be a stellar boxing press conference edging on to the limits of our mortal coil, or even on a space station?
The Green and Gold Belt has already been taken into space, so couldn`t this logically the next great step for boxingkind? One pace up from a place in the middle of a desert! Or is this too rich for your blood?
To accumulate you have to speculate. Muhammad Ali famously suggested: “The man who has no imagination has no wings!” George Bernard Shaw wrote: “You see things and you say why? But I dream things that never were and I say why not?”
Almost a hundred years ago, buccaneering boxing promoter Tex Rickard imagined the first million dollar gate for Dempsey Vs Tunney, but there wasn`t a stadium large enough to accommodate this. So he had it built himself, with money he begged, borrowed and bankrolled. He was thinking big.
As Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard said: “I`m big. It`s the pictures that got small!”
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