The November 22nd fight between WBO welterweight champion Manny Pacquiao and Chris Algieri, which will be televised by HBO pay-per-view, is getting only one thirty minute 24/7 series on HBO on November 8th at 1:00 a.m. (ET/PT) following the World Championship Boxing match-up between 49-year-old grizzled veteran Bernard Hopkins and the younger 31-year-old Sergey Kovalev.
This is a huge departure for Pacquiao for what his fights have previously received by HBO, and it begs the question whether this will be a new trend or a one-time thing with HBO. Granted, the Pacquiao-Algieri fight isn’t exciting many boxing fans, and it’s pretty clear already that Top Rank promoter Bob Arum made a mistake in selecting Algieri instead of someone a little more marketable and more charismatic.
It’s going to be interesting to see if Pacquiao’s trainer Freddie Roach spends a lot of time during the 24/7 episode talking about Floyd Mayweather Jr instead of the Pacquiao-Algieri fight. This is something we saw during the Pacquiao-Algieri press tour with Pacquiao, Arum and Roach talking about Mayweather a lot of the time instead of the Algieri fight.
This is a buzzkill for Pacquiao’s fans having him relegated to just one episode on HBO 24/7, because it’s going to result in less eyeballs seeing Pacquiao and Algieri try to push their fight. But it might be the right move on HBO’s part in having just one episode because after watching the recent Pacquiao-Algieri press tour, it was about as interesting as watching paint dry.
The high point of the entire tour was when Pacquiao stood on a chair in order to see the much taller Algieri eye to eye. We’re talking about a really boring press tour, and I can only imagine what it would have been like if there had been three Pacquiao/Algieri 24/7 episodes on HBO.
Sometimes more isn’t better, and in this case I think it would have ended up killing what little interest there was in the Pacquiao/Algieri fight if HBO had televised three episodes instead of just one. Algieri just doesn’t come across as someone that has any chance of winning this fight in my view, and the more he talks the more it seems like Arum made a really, really bad choice in selecting him as Pacquiao’s next opponent.
