By Allan Fox: Two days after the incredibly expensive to buy Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Manny Pacquiao fight last Saturday night, there are a lot of boxing fans, both casual and hardcore, who are very upset with the performances from both superstar fighters in their long-awaited fight in sin city.
Fans expected that with all the hype that went into the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight and the huge price tag to watch it, the two fighters would have been willing to lay it all on the line and give fans a thrilling fight.
After all, they weren’t just fighting for themselves, they were fighting for the sport to attract new fans. What we saw instead of a thrilling fight was a calculated defensive battle were both guys stayed mostly on the outside, looking to not to get hit and trying to pot shot.
In this case it wasn’t just Mayweather who fought cautiously, Pacquiao fought that way too much of the time. He wasn’t rushing forward looking to attack Mayweather all night long like we’d seen from Pacquiao in his fights against Chris Algieri, Tim Bradley, Brandon Rios and Juan Manuel Marquez. We saw Pacquiao fighting like he didn’t want to get hit.
NFL analyst Boomer Esiason is a casual fan of the sport and he too was very upset with the performance that he saw from Mayweather and Pacquiao. Esiason felt that the two fighters merely dances around the ring, boring the ringside fans at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada. For Esiason, he thought it was more interesting watching all the people that had come to the fight than the fight itself. Esiason concluded that boxing lost the chance of winning over the casual fight fans like himself with the poor efforts from Mayweather and Pacquiao.
“I watched the fight in Vegas last Saturday night and what a downer it was,” Esiason said via Sports Illustrated. “I felt like last week leading up to the event, boxing had a chance to capture people like me, casuals fans, to get us back interested in the sport. All they [Mayweather-Pacquiao] did was lay an egg.”
It’s probably too late to undo the damage that has been done with the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight. The fight was too dull and too one-sided to interest fans to pay to see a rematch between them. If there is a rematch, they might need to think seriously about dropping the price of the fight to a much lower number if they want to bring in PPV sales because there are a lot of boxing fans that will be insulted at having to pay $100 again for a fight that failed to live up to the billing last time. Asking fans to pay big money again will make the major players look greedy, and that could hurt the event in a big way.
“If you laid out $100 dollars to watch the thing on television, and while you were trying to lay down the $100 bucks, you got a snafu from your local cable company or DirecTV, you should be angry,” Esiason said. “We all should be angry because it was a $400 million fraud as far as I’m concerned. That fight was a bore, and there is nothing worse than watching two guys dance around and then walk out of the ring with both over $100 million in their pockets. As a casual fight fan, I’m going to remain that way because that fight did nothing to get me back into the sport,” Esiason said.
Comments are closed.