With the Heat beating the Celtics Thursday night, Saturday night will be an ultra busy night of sports including the big fight between Manny Pacquiao and Tim Bradley. To ensure that no one has to choose between a game 7 and the Pacquiao-Bradley fight, promoter Bob Arum has stated that the main event won’t start until the game is over.
As per most Pacquiao PPVs, Arum has the 6PM PDT/9PM EDT to 11PDT/2AM EDT PPV block of time and may actually need the additional time.
Bad Left Hook questions what will happen if the game goes into multiple OTs causing the HBO crew to stall and the fighters to wait. This could alter the outcome of the fight at most. And annoy all in attendance and watching on PPV at least.
Payout Perspective:
Arum’s assurance that the fight won’t start until the game was over was needed to secure some of those last minute PPV purchasers. Arum makes that tacit admission that most will not be watching the undercard when as the PPV begins 30 minutes after the start of Game 7. In addition to Heat-Celtics, there’s the NHL Stanley Cup as the Kings could win it on Saturday night. Throw in the Belmont earlier that afternoon, and it’s a full day of sports that Arum hopes will be capped off by Pacquiao-Bradley. But, the last minute fiddling of the scheduled start time for the main event was needed to ensure fence sitting PPV buys.
you also forgot euro 2012 in the morning which is bigger than all this.
And what a cap it was. Manny looking his vintage self and suffering the worst robbery I have witnessed in a fight sport. Ridiculous judging capping an exciting, though not terribly competitive fight. I give Bradley credit for a gutsy performance, he didn’t just show up for the paycheck, but he definitely didn’t win.
I’ve still never seen a robbery in pro boxing like Holyfield – Lews 1. When you consider the round by round stats, significance of the event for the sport, and just the sheer consensus that it was a horrible robbery, I think it will long reign as # 1 in combat sports.
Agree with both of you. I think the biggest loser may actually have been Juan Manuel Marquez. He did much more in November than Bradley did last night. Second would be the fans since we may see a PacMan-Bradley trilogy and not a PacMan-Mayweather trilogy.
I hope there’s no Pacman-Bradley trilogy. The fight wasn’t competitive enough to warrant it. If both fighters turn in identical performances in November and we get three competent judges the resulting scorecards should be lopsided enough to not warrant a third.
Holyfield-Lewis was pretty bad as well, though I suspect Don King was behind that one. I’m not sure who profits in the current scenario.