Will Top Rank's Risky Play to Produce Its Own PPV Fight Have a Big Reward?

Manny Pacquiao and HBO have been linked for much of the Filipino icon’s professional career.

Virtually all of his big-time pay-per-view showdowns have been carried by HBO PPV—including huge events against Oscar De La Hoya, Miguel Cotto and Juan Manuel Marquez—and the last time he fought off-network was a 2011 Showtime PPV fight with Shane Mosley.

HBO passed on that event, and it's decided to do the same with Saturday night’s showdown between Pacquiao and WBO welterweight champion Jessie Vargas.

HBO wasn’t willing to split its resources between two competing events with a prior commitment to airing Sergey Kovalev’s defense of the light heavyweight title against Andre Ward two weeks later.

After some initial anger from Bob Arum and Co.—the veteran promoter accused HBO of “abandoning” Pacquiao after “sucking him dry for 10 years,” per Lance Pugmire of the Los Angeles Times—Top Rank elected to take the gamble of putting on the PPV event without network support.

The biggest downside of that decision comes on the promotional end.

Keep in mind that the third Pacquiao-Bradley fight, with complete HBO backing, was a huge disappointment, drawing between 400,000 to 500,000 subscriptions.

Isaac Brekken/Associated Press

HBO is known for using its platform to hype fights through original programming, such as its 24/7 series that chronicles the fighters in the days and weeks leading up to fight night. The series is wildly popular and gives the fans an insight into the fighter’s preparations, building interest.

The lack of buzz for Pacquiao-Vargas is palpable.

Some of that has to do with the perceived weakness of the matchup.

Vargas is a good fighter. He’s got a size advantage—5'10" to Pacquiao's 5'6"—and has developed his right hand into a dangerous, fight-changing weapon. But he’s just not elite. And with Pacquiao easily beating Bradley in a third fight nobody wanted, this isn’t a fight people are jazzed up about.

Some of it comes from the fact that very little seems to have been done to promote the fight to an audience beyond the hardcore sort who follow the sport day to day.

It’s a fight that could probably use the blanket coverage provided by HBO distribution, but even with the risks associated, Arum (now that cooler heads have prevailed) is looking at this as an opportunity to test the waters for a new PPV model.

“Just like most human beings, you go and accept the status quo,” Arum said to RingTV.com (h/t Robby Kalland of CBS Sports) “And so for years we’ve had this plan of having HBO distribute and it was convenient. Now, because of their position that we were too close to the Ward-Kovalev fight, we suddenly realized—who the hell needs them?”

HBO usually receives a 7.5-percent fee from the fight sales, and that’s money which Top Rank will now be able to pocket by taking the fight directly to major PPV distributors without using the network as a go-between.

Arum says that HBO negotiates the distribution contracts with Direct TV, Dish and In Demand, but Top Rank does the contracts itself, so the impact of not having that middleman should be negligible as a practical matter.

Christian Petersen/Getty Images

The big loss, again, comes from not having the promotional might of HBO pushing the fight to the fans through its programming and marketing campaigns.

You could argue that Pacquiao—perhaps the biggest international star in the sport’s history—doesn’t need the promotion, but it helps. The final verdict on that score will come when the PPV numbers are finally counted, assuming we ever get an accurate number.

In today’s climate, those figures are often as secret as the nuclear codes, but unlike the latter, luckily, the former have a way of trickling out. We’ll get some idea.

And then we’ll know whether this gambit was ultimately a success or a flop.

A lot of people will be watching too.

Boxing is a traditional sport in a lot of ways.

Things are done a certain way, and there’s rarely a ton of deviation from the norm. But if this works out, it could prove to be the beginning of something new—a new model for fight-distribution and perhaps news ways for reaching the fans and driving interest.

It’s not a challenge; it’s an opportunity.

“There’s other platforms [than the cable networks], there’s other people, there’s other individuals that are very interested in running with really good shoulder programming that would help drive awareness,” Top Rank president Todd duBoef said, per Bob Velin of USA Today. “So I look at it like a free pass. This is like a great opportunity for all of us, and it’s been very empowering for our staff, which is largely a very talented staff that wants to be creative and go ahead and move with this.”

Will it work?

Maybe.

Either way, it's an interesting test case.