Pacquiao-Cotto pay-per-view buys to reach 2 million?

MANILA, Philippines - The recent welterweight megafight between Filipino boxing icon Manny Pacquiao and Puerto Rican WBO champion Miguel Cotto is expected to generate close to 2 million pay-per-view buys.

“They’re very good,” said Top Rank promoter Bob Arum in an interview with Boxingtalk.com., referring to the PPV figures. “Yeah, it’s well over one million but I really don’t know. It will be somewhere north of one million.”

Rey Colón of the “El Vocero” of Puerto Rico reported that the fight, which Pacquiao won via a convincing 12th round TKO, made approximately two million pay-per-view buys generating at least $120 million in revenues.

No word on what Pacquiao´s cut will be but Cotto was mentioned to be making at least $10 million. (Related story on Page 21)

Pacquiao had a guaranteed purse of $13 million in the Cotto fight.

Arum has earlier indicated that he had “pretty much the final numbers” for Puerto Rico alone which he said “set a record” by surpassing the previous record of 80,000 for the Felix “Tito” Trinidad-Oscar De La Hoya fight.

He also guessed that the Pacquiao-Cotto duel, billed as Firepower and which drew 16,200 fans at the MGM Grand Arena, did a little bit more than 110,000, adding that the fight would do around 1.3 million although he said there were no numbers from New York, Pennsylvania and California, which are big points.

In an interview with Boxingscene.com, Arum, however, said that he had the figures for San Diego and Hawaii “which were good numbers.”

Arum recalled that the Pacquiao-De La Hoya fight last year did 1.25 million buys and in the East “so far we are doing 40 percent better and in the West we are doing about 10 percent less.”

Arum also said that “we are happy because we did well over a million homes and I think it will be closer to 1.5 million.”

There were keen interests on the number of PPV buys for the Pacquiao-Cotto fight since this will weigh heavily on the negotiations for the potential blockbuster fight between Pacquiao against the unbeaten Mayweather.

For one, Arum said he would wait for the final result of the PPV before making a move to negotiate with the Golden Boy Promotions, which handles Mayweather.

Even Mayweather Jr., who the world wants to be Pacquiao’s next opponent, has admitted that the Pacquiao-Cotto fight should do more buys than his bout with Juan Manuel Marquez which posted 1.1 million.

“I’ve done over a million homes by myself. Now we got Pacquiao and Cotto, two guys who have a pretty cool fan base, so if they do more homes than Mayweather, more power to them, but they supposed to. I don’t have no dance partner,” said Mayweather Jr. in an interview with Sky Sports.        – Dante Navarro