Promoters miss another opportunity

LAS VEGAS – The public relations staff at the MGM Grand Hotel & Casino has, as has become customary for major boxing matches, constructed a lavish media center to host the journalists in town to cover Saturday's HBO Pay-Per-View fight between Oscar De La Hoya and Manny Pacquiao in its Grand Garden arena.

Tickets sold out in two hours, though the overwhelming majority went to brokers who had hoped to hawk them for three, four or even five times their face value.

But the brokers lost that gamble and tickets are freely available below their actual cost.

"Too bad," Pacquiao promoter Bob Arum said, sharply, of the brokers' plight. "I'm not going to feel badly for any ticket brokers."

Nor does, or should, anyone else.

The media center is filled with journalists who ignore 99.8 percent of all of the boxing matches held these days. Many of them, when they do write about the sport, talk about the dire straits that it is in, which is true at least in regard to the U.S.

Boxing thrives in other parts of the world, but is being ignored more and more by American media outlets as they've struggled to cut costs and adapt to a 21st century way of doing business.

The promoters have, yet again, missed an exceptional chance to inject life back into the sport by putting on the kind of undercard that would have sent a message to the assembled journalists that while boxing may be ignored in the U.S. media, it's hardly dead.

The undercard is filled with gifted young fighters, beginning with the next superstar from Puerto Rico, WBO super bantamweight champion Juan Manuel Lopez. Highly regarded super lightweight Victor Ortiz is also fighting on the pay-per-view, as is emerging sensation Daniel Jacobs, who is 12-0 with 11 knockouts.

But none of the three is in a fight in which they're truly being tested and they're all expected to win easily.

That kind of undercard does nothing to help position boxing for 2009.

Why not, on the one occasion when there is a large media turnout, shock the reporters by putting on a lights out undercard? It's fine to have Jacobs and Lopez and Ortiz on the card, but move them to the non-televised portion.

For the folks who are plunking down $54.95 for the standard definition broadcast or $64.95 for the high definition showing, why not put on an undercard that would drop jaws?

It would have made sense, say, to have signed Juan Manuel Marquez to fight Juan Diaz in the opener. And then to have Rafael Marquez and Israel Vazquez face each other for a fourth time in the show's penultimate bout.

Promoters have dubbed the card, "The Dream Match," but that would have been the way to literally make it a dream match. And if it cost $8 million to put those two fights on the undercard – and it likely would have been slightly less – would it not have been worth it given the millions the promotion is going to generate?

If it sells the 1.5-million pay-per-view units that Golden Boy CEO Richard Schaefer suggests, that would account for a minimum of $82 million in pay-per-view revenue.

That's plenty for De La Hoya, Pacquiao and the promoters to make a plentiful profit and still put on a compelling undercard.

The third bout between Rafael Marquez and Vazquez is probably going to be the 2008 Fight of the Year. Yahoo! Sports chose the second fight between them as 2007 Fight of the Year.

And as good as all three of those bouts were – and a fourth promises to equally as exciting – a potential Juan Manuel Marquez-Diaz fight could be even better.

Those kinds of fights would remind the journalists who fail to cover most boxing matches of what the sport can be when it is done right. There would be a buzz in the crowd heading to the main event that had not been felt in years.

The main event almost can't help but be an entertaining battle because of the styles of the fighters. Both men prefer a firefight to a technical display of boxing and that kind of match can end at any point.

De La Hoya is far too big for Pacquiao, who has fought 75 percent of his 52 bouts at 122 pounds of less. De La Hoya has fought at lightweight or higher for all but two of his bouts.

Though Pacquiao is clearly the faster and more skilled fighter, the bout will hinge on whether he can take a left hook from De La Hoya, which will inevitably land while they're in the midst of one of the many exchanges they engage in.

De La Hoya's chin can't be questioned, as he's taken blows from tremendous punchers at 147, 154 and 160 pounds and kept coming. Though no one has ever accused Pacquiao of having a bad chin, that's been while he's been fighting super featherweights, featherweights, super bantamweights, flyweights and mini-flyweights.

De La Hoya may not be as quick, or as skilled, as he once was, but he still punches hard for a welterweight and a super welterweight. And that power should lead him to a mid-round knockout.

If Pacquiao, the world's finest boxer, wins, it will be a tribute to his talent, courage and tenacity, but will be more of a statement of how completely shot De La Hoya is.

Nearly 17,000 will fill the arena on Saturday. The largest pay-per-view audience of the year will be watching.

Arum, as is his custom, is exceedingly optimistic about the pay-per-view's prospects. He said on Thursday that figures were tracking far better than expected and that he wouldn't be shocked if it reached 2 million. Only the 2007 match between De La Hoya and Floyd Mayweather Jr. ever hit that magical number, settling at an astounding 2.44 million.

Schaefer insists he's still hoping for 1.5 million, which would be a bonanza and the second-best non-heavyweight result in history.

Regardless of how well it does, the card could have had longer-term benefits for the sport if the promoters had swallowed hard, put up the money and stacked the undercard.

It would have been the ultimate statement for boxing to make on its biggest night.