Showtime Sports big time boss vice president Stephen Espinosa came out of the woodwork on Friday quash the rumors about the Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Robert Guerrero fight resulting in less than 1 million pay per view buys on Showtime from last Saturday night. Espinosa says the fight did no less than 1 million PPV buys, although he’s still not sure what the full tally is as of now, but it is more than 1 million.
The fight resulted in 14,258 tickets sold for a gate of $9.9 million at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada, making it the 16th biggest gate of all time in Las Vegas.
The 1 million PPV total really shows Mayweather’s ability to attract boxing fans to purchase his fight cards because he did this essentially without any help from Guerrero because few casual boxing fans had ever heard of him before this fight, and they obviously didn’t purchase the card due to him. Guerrero was less than larger the live during the All Access Mayweather vs. Guerrero episodes on Showtime, as his personally was overshadowed by his much larger than life father Ruben Guerrero, who took over most of the trash talking.
This let Guerrero talk religion and that may or may not have helped the popularity of the fight. My guess is it didn’t effect it much either way other than distracting from what needed to be talked about and that was how a low fighter like Guerrero was going to beat the incredibly fast and highly skilled Mayweather. At the end of the day, Mayweather didn’t have the skills to compete with Mayweather and ended up getting totally dominated in a 12 round unanimous decision loss.
The high PPV totals for the fight gives Mayweather more freedom to pick his next fight without feeling obligated to fight a guy from a division or two above him like WBA/WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez or one of the middleweights like Sergio Martinez. Showtime would like nothing better than to see Mayweather fight Canelo, but if Mayweather can still get huge PPV buys without having to deal with the 172 pound Canelo, it might be better off not taking that risk.
Golden Boy Promotions CEO Richard Schaefer Richard Schaefer already said Canelo can’t move down below 154 to fight. That means that Mayweather would have to move up in weight and in theory end up facing a guy that could outweigh by 20 pounds.