Sunday, May 3, 2015

The Fight of the Century

This past Saturday May the second boxing saw one of this biggest and most anticipated boxing matches of all time in the Welterweight division. Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao, two of boxings greatest, stepped into the ring Saturday night after five years of back and forth negotiation for making this fight happen. I have followed closely the past couple years as it has been brought up and every time was a disappointment because they two could never agree to each others terms. I started to think that this was more and more of a marketing ploy by Mayweather every time negotiations stopped and the two moved on to fight other people. Mayweather is one of the smartest and most effective marketers when it comes to promoting his up coming fights. He continually breaks pay per view records and has been the highest paid athlete for years now. This is because he promote and sells himself as good as he does actually boxing. He is succesful with marketing himself by getting people to both like him and hate him. That's exactly where he wants to be in the mindset of his fans. Not only will all of his fans continue to buy his fight but also his enemies want to see the undefeated boxer lose therefor doubling his audience. Although both parties are to blame for the fight taking this long to happen but i believe it was more so of the Mayweather side. He is always thinking about ways to maximize pay per view numbers and this was an excellent opportunity to do so. After much anticipation the past 5 years, the two had finally agreed to fight and brought with it millions of new boxing fans that wanted to be apart of history. This fight generated over 400 million dollars and each fighter was written a check of 100 million dollars for their 12 round 36 minute fight. That's $138,000 a second. Ridiculous. This is the reason why i believe Mayweather waited all these years to fight Pacquiao. It is near the end of both fighters careers and what a better way to leave the sport then to fight each other and make a quick 180 million while your at it. Boxing is a dying sport, but with this fight brought in new viewers and a chance for boxing to get back to where it used to be.

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