Canelo vs. Khan (5/7/2016) - Las Vegas, NV (T-Mobile Arena)

[Elsalvajeloco]

How many KO artists have there been since Tyson that haven't sold anything?

Golovkin vs. Lemieux is probably the best middleweight fight (with you know...two actual middleweights) since the end of the Hopkins era. It sold around 150k on PPV.  Pavlik vs. Taylor II did 50k better than that, and Pavlik is just some great white hope from the Rust Belt.

Golovkin vs. Billy Joe Saunders ain't selling shit on PPV. Neither is a fight with Andy Lee. People expect those fights to be on World Championship Boxing. The same was expected of the Lemieux fight.

[J.T.]

50 minutes ago, Elsalvajeloco said:

How many KO artists have there been since Tyson that haven't sold anything?

How many of those KO artists have been as close to unifying a world title as GGG is?

How many of those KO artists were as brutal or dominant as GGG is?

GGG is a special fighter.  We're not talking John Mugabi special who murders his way to a title, loses on his first defense, and never sees the belt again.  We're talking Kostya Tszyu / Julio Caesar Chavez / Mike Tyson in their primes special. 

The inability to market that shows me how far down Boxing is on the sports food chain

[Elsalvajeloco]

54 minutes ago, J.T. said:

How many of those KO artists have been as close to unifying a world title as GGG is?

How many of those KO artists were as brutal or dominant as GGG is?

GGG is a special fighter.  We're not talking John Mugabi special who murders his way to a title, loses on his first defense, and never sees the belt again.  We're talking Kostya Tszyu / Julio Caesar Chavez / Mike Tyson in their primes special. 

The inability to market that shows me how down Boxing is on the sports food chain

When it comes to special, it doesn't sell anything on PPV anymore. I think it's a boxing problem (especially with the way Mayweather/Pacquiao turned out), but it's more a cultural thing. If being a special fighter sells anything, Mighty Mouse would be a way bigger draw than Ronda Rousey, whose best win is Miesha Tate. Hell, we don't even have to look that far. Look at the man fighting on every GGG co-main. Roman Gonzalez is arguably the best flyweight EVER. Not like in recent times...but of all times. How well would a fight between Gonzalez and Francisco Estrada sell on PPV, and that technically could be a better than Canelo/GGG in terms of resume. And you would say, "well...middleweight is more a money division in boxing". Shit, not in recent times. The biggest "middleweight" fight since 2004 (Hopkins vs. Oscar) involved a junior middleweight (who still hasn't fought at the proper middleweight limit still) and a man whose best days came at 140 and his early run at 147 who beat a man with virtually no legs. The fact that Canelo has his fanbase and Cotto has his PR fanbase meant more than some bullshit lineal title.

Hell, Saunders has the WBO belt now. If the WBC made Golovkin full champ (and the RING stripped Canelo as well), that fight might do less than a quarter million on PPV.  That's a fight that would make the first unified UNIFIED middleweight champion in ten years. The fact that HBO cannot galvanize a fanbase for an opponent (they cashed in on Lemieux way too soon, but they had no options really) is what is Golovkin's PPV financial downfall. If HBO never pressured Pacquiao (or Mayweather before the 2012 division with Haymon), why would they expect the Canelo fight with GGG to fall into their lap? They tried to go into 25 different directions early on and didn't have a proper plan of action. Hey, he might fight Andy Lee? What about a fight with Andre Ward even though Ward doesn't have a fanbase either and hasn't fought in like a year at that point? Maybe Cotto if he doesn't lose to Canelo (he did)? Literally, none of those fights have materialized since the BAD fight with Proksa fight where he debuted on HBO. They only arrived at the Lemieux fight because of something Lemieux said after the N'Dam fight that aired on Fox Sports Deportes.

You can have good to stellar HBO ratings and still not have the appeal to get people drop cash on seeing that thing specifically. The special thing and the crossover appeal only generates so much when people expect certain things. The fanbase expects to see him on WCB or at the very least catch his shit on Vine, Twitter, IG, or ESPN post-fight. The middleweight division is not that good, and they ain't no money names at 168 really. I think the novelty of being special in combat sports (or WWE for that matter considering their lack of star making ability compared to all the talent they actually have) is pretty much worn thin. We seen a guy almost win 100 straight pro boxing matches in our lifetime. We seen a person terrorize the middleweight division for 10 years (then go on to pick up wins at light heavyweight) and build a HOF candidacy right before our very eyes during that timeframe. So for someone like GGG to have his run is good (especially since he isn't tied to Golden Boy, TR, or Haymon), but the mountain is way steeper now. If you're on the wrong side of 30 and don't have the political clout those three (well two IMO because DLH is doing Arum's bidding) entities offer, it's going to be tough sledding.

[J.T.]

Mighty Mouse is not a bigger deal because Dana is lazy and depends on a fighter's rep to sell the fight rather than expending too much marketing effort on promoting their bouts.  

MMA really doesn't stress to fighters that they should self promote and TBH, most MMA fans and pundits seem to frown on those fighters who do or at least they look forward to watching those "egomaniacs" get their asses whipped.

I don't think that Pac / Money is a good example because that fight happened years later than it should have.

GGG is not treated with the reverence that he should be because boxing is divided up into their little camps and those camps really don't want to see unified champions anymore.

GBP can make a mint from Canelo's fights without even acknowledging that GGG holds 2/3rds of the original boxing triple crown.  It is in DLH's best interest that Canelo does not fight GGG anytime soon.  The first payday will be stupendous, but if GGG goes through Canelo by R6, who will really want a rematch and what fighter will sign up next to take that beating?

We live in a post-Tyson era where lights out boxers are not draws anymore.  We live in the Mayweather era where champs have to piss fans off so that the fans spend money in the hope of getting to see the challenger win and it is better for numbers if the fight goes the distance.

 

[Elsalvajeloco]

21 hours ago, J.T. said:

Mighty Mouse is not a bigger deal because Dana is lazy and depends on a fighter's rep to sell the fight rather than expending too much marketing effort on promoting their bouts.  

MMA really doesn't stress to fighters that they should self promote and TBH, most MMA fans and pundits seem to frown on those fighters who do or at least they look forward to watching those "egomaniacs" get their asses whipped.

I don't think that Pac / Money is a good example because that fight happened years later than it should have.

GGG is not treated with the reverence that he should be because boxing is divided up into their little camps and really don't want to see unified champions anymore, especially if they unify belts at the expense of someone else's meal ticket. 

GBP can make a mint from Canelo's fights without even acknowledging that GGG holds 2/3rds of the original boxing triple crown.  It is in DLH's best interest that Canelo does not fight GGG anytime soon.  The first payday will be stupendous, but if GGG goes through Canelo by R6, who will really want a rematch and what fighter will sign up next to take that beating?

We live in a post-Tyson era where lights out boxers are not draws anymore.  We live in the Mayweather era where champs have to piss fans off so that the fans spend money in the hope of getting to see the challenger win and it is better for numbers if the fight goes the distance.

 

1. People have been using this marketing thing way too much. They've actually marketed Mighty Mouse more than they have with Werdum, and he's actually their HW champion. They've cut commercial ads specifically for his fights specifically saying that he is the best fighter P4P. Shit, Meltzer even complained that the UFC shouldn't even waste their time with the MM commercial (this was before Cormier fell out of the fight). It's not a marketing thing. How many soundbytes does Mighty Mouse have that makes you believe he should go on a late night TV show run (which barely registers with the MMA crowds anyway)? I love Mighty Mouse, but do you really need stuff about him talking about Twitch or Xbox?

2. Rousey and McGregor have their fair amount of self-promotion within the UFC platforms. The Do Nothing Bitches came during the Embedded thing. McGregor's great lines all came during UFC pressers (whether they be during fight week or the post fight presser). The Q&A McGregor did in Brazil a couple years ago was fucking tremendous. The thing is.....a ton of fighters have those opportunities (including people like Mighty Mouse) and they really failed to capitalize on those opportunities. They've sent as many as five fighters out there for Q&As and generated little to no buzz. Shit, they stopped doing press conferences for like nine or ten months because people didn't say diddly shit worth anything. They only brought them back basically when they got people like Rousey and McGregor, who might say something worthwhile.

3. I brought up Mayweather/Pacquiao basically you said boxing is down on the radar. I'm saying that yeah, of course boxing is down on the radar because when you have a bunch of casual fans (we're talking millions) watch a mediocre fight or a fight that went down how most people in the know expected, people are going to be pissed off. I'm saying it's that and a variety of different other factors as well outside of the problems generally associated with the sport of boxing.

4, 5, 6. Boxing in the PPV era has always been divided in camps. PPV just emphasized it even more. GGG isn't Mexican, Puerto Rican, or an Irish-American/Italian-American working class white guy who captivates the 18-34 white males who need a white fighting savior. For the very latter, most of those guys went to MMA during TUF season 1/Chuck Liddell on Entourage if they didn't turn off boxing completely save for a few big fights. Even with a wildcard fanbase, Pacquiao was still a perfect storm. He was a Filipino fighting machine who was able to capitalize on the fact that 122-130 was hot as shit at that moment. Between 135-140 (post Cotto and Floyd going to welterweight), there wasn't soul that could give him a tough fight that wasn't named Juan Manuel Marquez. So all he had to was to punch his ticket on the De La Hoya fight. Between 154, 160, and 168, you have one and a half stars. You got Canelo and Cotto, who is on his way out once his Roc Nation deal expires. That's it. Out of those three fighters (including GGG), Canelo is the one with time on his side. He is a 25 year old fighter who hasn't taken a ton of punishment and already has people paying for his fights. He can drag this out as long as he likes. He still holds the cards. Mayweather didn't fight Cotto in 2007 because he didn't get "good" ratings on HBO. You can do that when you're a superstar, and have someone like Al Haymon who knows how to pull power plays. This was back when HBO had more cards in their deck. Right now, they're not going to jeopardize what draw(s) they do have. So if it means letting Canelo fight welterweights (or blown up junior welters like Khan) at bullshit catchweights, that's what they're going to do.

[grilledcheese]

On ‎5‎/‎8‎/‎2016 at 11:43 AM, Serious Darius Bagfelt said:

Geez and I thought Honeyghan dumped the belt so he could avoid Mark Breland 

Some from column A, some from column B, right? Lloyd should have continued avoiding him, seeing as how that fight ended up when they finally got together.

[The Natural]

For posterity:

[Josh Mann]

He wasn't trying to end him with that punch. It was just a lead right counter to the jab that existsted only to extract a toll anytime Khan got a little too close. But he caught him far enough back to where he was able to extend. 

I get that Khan's chin is beyond suspect, but that punch at that ting from that distance and angle would have dropped a polar bear. 

[Elsalvajeloco]

Canelo was starting to get closer somewhere in round 3. Initially, I thought he was probably going to stun with a right hand and lead to it all going downhill for Khan. However, Khan left the entire right side of his face sitting out there. All Canelo needed to do was hit it, and it would be over.