From Michael Rosenthal at The Ring:
[Richard] Schaefer said the pay-per-view tally for the Bernard Hopkins-Roy Jones Jr. fight on April 3 is at about 130,000 but is expected to approach 150,000 after all the figures are in.
Golden Boy set 300,000 as its goal. However, some experts wondered whether it would exceed 100,000, which Schaefer said was overly pessimistic.
"They ARE two big names," he said.
They WERE two big names, but OK, and that's some nice spin at the end of this.
- Report very low figure
- Explain that very low figure is half (150,000) what the goal was (300,000)
- Point out that people who said it might not go over 100,000 were "overly pessimistic," which I suppose has been proven to be relatively true
- End there
- Without pointing out that the "overly pessimistic" number is three times closer to the reality than the Golden Boy goal
This 150,000-buy show did worse than the massive flops of Calzaghe-Jones (220K) and Pavlik-Hopkins (180K) the last time either were on a major and properly-promoted PPV. Maybe you can adjust that and explain it away with the fact that HBO didn't promote this show, and did promote those two, but it probably should've told them all something when HBO bailed on promoting this stinkbomb to begin with. Nobody wanted to see this fight.
Perhaps I am "hating." Maybe I should let it go. But now we've got Hopkins going insane in the media again, claiming bias and this and that and everyone's against him, but the fact of the matter is he cannot sell a fight anymore, and never really could. Why would anyone want to promote an extremely stubborn negotiator who can't back it up at the bank? And to make it all worse, THIS fight sure as hell didn't help his image in any way.