Final tally of Delahoya-Mayweather = more $$$ for Oscar & Floyd
HBO said with the buys now fully accounted for, the fight actually generated 2.4 million buys and $134.4 million in domestic PPV revenue, bringing the total revenue for the event to approximately $165 million.
It is common for early pay-per-view tallies to rise once all the buys are counted, but the magnitude of the boost came as a surprise.
"When you're talking about a record, with numbers that are so big, you want to get it exactly right, and it takes a long time to count to 2.4 million," HBO PPV chief Mark Taffet told ESPN.com on Thursday.
The amended figures also vaulted De La Hoya into first place as the all-time pay-per-view sales king. His 18 PPV fights have sold 12.8 million units, sending him past Evander Holyfield's record of 12.6 million, which does not include the undisclosed total for his Oct. 13 PPV fight against Sultan Ibragimov. But that fight is not expected to reach even 100,000 buys.
The increase from $120 million to $134.4 million in PPV revenue means De La Hoya's events have generated $626.4 million, extending his revenue lead over second-place Mike Tyson ($545 million).
To put the revised De La Hoya-Mayweather numbers in perspective, De La Hoya's 1999 welterweight unification match against Felix Trinidad set the old record for a non-heavyweight fight with 1.4 million units sold. De La Hoya-Mayweather eclipsed that by 1 million, or the total of De La Hoya's 2004 HBO PPV fight with Bernard Hopkins.
The old all-time record for PPV buys was 1.99 million set by the 1997 heavyweight championship rematch between Holyfield and Tyson (the ear-bite fight). Now, De La Hoya-Mayweather is comfortably in first place all-time by 401,000 buys.
The De La Hoya-Mayweather increase to 2.4 million buys means that the total from the original tally rose by 250,000, or about 20,000 more than the total for the March fight between Juan Manuel Marquez and Marco Antonio Barrera.
"Very few people really understand what it means to be a fighter. I hate it when I hear someone say, 'That fighter doesn't have guts. I hate that, I don't care if you're a world champion six times over or a four-round fighter, to step inside that ring, you have to have guts" Oscar De La Hoya
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