No one was expecting a big number, and a big number didn’t appear.
My take on this, it's done just 10,000 more than Golovkin-Lemieux and in that fight, it was Golovkin the only big name, whereas here, Ward and Kovalev are supposed to be big boxing names. For a first time PPV, I would still call it poor numbers, maybe the casuals didn't buy, or promotion wasn't done well. Now the big question, the artice states a rematch would need to be on standard HBO, however, how the first fight unfolded, could they risk PPV again, knowing a lot more people will be interested in the fight?In truth, expectations going into the fight were rather tempered considering that neither Ward nor Kovalev had been on PPV before and neither is a particularly big draw. So RingTV’s reported number of roughly 160,000 PPV buys certainly sounds about right.
It still is a bit of a shame, though. Kovalev-Ward was a truly competitive fight between two top pound-for-pound fighters which ultimately lived up to it’s hype, despite a rather controversial ending.
In that sense this number has to be at least a little disappointing because this fight truly represented the best of what boxing has to offer, even though it was absent any mainstream star-power to carry the promotion. So, just to put things in perspective, Manny Pacquiao’s perceived mismatch against Jessie Vargas just a couple weeks earlier did nearly twice as many PPV buys (roughly 300,000) than Kovalev-Ward did.
It is possible that the close proximity of those two PPV’s adversely affected the latter’s performance, but I don’t really buy into that theory. As good as both Kovalev and Ward are, neither one of them transcends the niche boxing audience, which I think has much more to do with the number of sales (or lack thereof).
Now, with all signs pointing towards a rematch, one has to wonder if Part II might not be better suited for a standard HBO telecast.
