Mayweather vs. Pacquiao: Contract Agreement Reached, Tickets to Be Released

With just over one week to go before Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao square off in Las Vegas on May 2, there's finally a plan in place to make whatever tickets are still available to the general public for sale.    

According to Kevin Iole of Yahoo Sports, Top Rank Promotions and Mayweather Promotions came to an agreement Wednesday on contract details that will allow tickets to be distributed:

Iole also supplied the ticket release details:

Iole also reported that a phone call between Pacquiao and Mayweather representatives allowed them to iron out the details that have held things up:

Per Jill Martin of CNN, Top Rank CEO Bob Arum told CNN's Don Riddell that tickets for Mayweather-Pacquiao will go on sale Wednesday:

Dan Rafael of ESPN provided more details on the release of the tickets from Top Rank presiden Todd duBoef:

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That means tickets could be on sale as soon as Wednesday afternoon Pacific Time. However, duBoef said only about 500 of the roughly 16,000 tickets available will go on public sale. The rest are controlled by Mayweather Promotions, Top Rank and the MGM Grand, who will distribute the tickets -- which everyone has to pay for -- to their customers, the fighter camps, the fight sponsors, HBO and Showtime (who are putting on the joint pay-per-view), as well as the brokers with whom they do business.

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Rafael also provided information on ticket prices for the public sale, according to duBoef:

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The face value of the tickets will be $1,500, $2,500, $3,500, $5,000, $7,500 and $10,000 depending on seating, but duBoef said none of the $10,000 tickets would be part of the public sale, which will not include any floor seats.

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This has been one of the strangest situations for a major sporting event. Mayweather and Pacquiao have been doing promotion and training for the fight, but the actual contract for the bout had not been signed.

According to ESPN.com's Darren Rovell, Arum was refusing to sign a deal he recently received because it wasn't the one originally agreed to.

With tickets going on sale at such a late date, with the fight just 10 days away, Iole wrote Tuesday that a lot of fans "said on social media they're canceling their hotel reservations and changing plans to be in Las Vegas" because they didn't have enough time to pay for airfare and cover the cost of a ticket. 

As far as the number of tickets available after all of the corporate seats and the celebrities get their share, Steve Carp of the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported there are expected to be fewer than 1,000 available for public distribution. 

Even though getting into the MGM Grand Garden Arena is going to be nearly impossible for most, people in Las Vegas will have the opportunity to watch the fight by purchasing tickets to a closed-circuit broadcast at MGM properties. 

It's been an unusual journey for both promotions to finally get things settled before the biggest fight in years, but there appears to finally be a settlement that will give people a small window to purchase tickets.