Golovkin – Lemieux generates 150,000 PPV Buys

According to Dan Rafael of espn.com, Last Saturday night’s Pay Per view between Gennady Golovkin and David Lemieux generated 150,000 buys.

“It will do just over 150,000 buys, which was the number we originally based things on when we talked to [Lemieux promoter] Golden Boy about making the fight to determine how much Lemieux would need and what Gennady would need,” said K2”s Tom Loeffler said.

“I thought it would have a good chance to break 200,000, but with all the college football games and no way to predict the Mets would be playing the Cubs — a high-end playoff series — it was tough,” he said. “A lot of people were watching baseball in those big markets, but overall, we were happy with the event. When you can sell every single ticket to Madison Square Garden and generate a gate of over $2 million, you’re happy.”

HBO Sports senior vice president Mark Taffet, who runs HBO PPV, said the event was a strong first-time pay-per-view effort for Golovkin, regarded by many as a future face of boxing in the wake of Floyd Mayweather’s retirement last month.

“Golovkin-Lemieux met or exceeded every benchmark of success which was set going into the event,” Taffet told ESPN.com. “The PPV buys solidly met expectations even amidst the Mets-Cubs national telecast registering the highest-ever TBS baseball playoff viewership, including the PPV-critical markets of New York and Chicago. This, combined with the palpable excitement of the sold-out crowd in Madison Square Garden and the in-ring performances by Gennady Golovkin and [co-feature winner Roman] ‘Chocolatito’ Gonzalez, encourage us that the next great era of boxing has begun and will continue with the highly-anticipated [Miguel] Cotto-Canelo [Alvarez)] megafight on Nov. 21.”

“But we’ve always taken risks to get Gennady where he’s at,” Loeffler. “And so we thought it was the right step at this point. It was worth it. We generated a lot of money with the pay-per-view, delay rights from HBO, the closed circuit and the international revenue.

“A lot of people focus on the American market, but he had one of the highest rated international shows in the U.K. on BoxNation, on SAT.1 in Germany and the biggest channel in Russia. He was also on Polsat, the biggest channel in Poland, for the first time. And on top of that, the Garden told us we broke the merchandise record for any boxing event there: over $122,000.”

“He is the type of fighter who can fight on HBO and still have a significant budget or have a big fight on pay-per-view,” Loeffler said. “I thought we gave the fans a lot of value with considering the ticket prices and the price of the pay-per-view. It was their first time on pay-per-view, and even though we thought it might break 200,000, we certainly don’t look at it as a negative. The fight still generated more than the license fee would have been from HBO, and the international sales were very strong, as were our sponsorships.”