Mayweather's return strikes gold with 1 million PPV buys

Floyd Mayweather's return to the ring last week on pay-per-view was more than a hit.

It was a home run that exceeded expectations to become the No. 1 boxing PPV of 2009.

The Mayweather-Juan Manuel Marquez non-title bout drew 1 million buys — roughly $52 million, according to HBO PPV — at MGM Grand in Las Vegas last Saturday, by far the former welterweight champion's greatest showing as the headliner.

It is only the fifth time in boxing pay-per-view history that a non-heavyweight event has reached the one million mark.

The fight wasn't as big of a success at the box office, especially considering that it was Mexican Independence weekend with a popular Mexican fighter moving up to face the former pound-for-pound king. It earned a $6.8 million gate with 12,006 sold, but more than 2,600 tickets went unsold and 845 seats were comps, or giveaways.

Although Mayweather had appeared on PPV three previous times, he failed to break 400,000 buys as the draw. Mayweather's 2007 bout with Oscar De La Hoya scored a record 2.4 million buys. His matchup seven months later with then-undefeated Ricky Hatton registered 920,000 buys. But De La Hoya is the all-time leader in PPV sales and Hatton is a popular Englishman with a large fan base.

The Marquez bout, an easy 12-round decision for Mayweather who was returning from an almost two-year layoff, lacked the drama of last year's top selling PPV bout (Manny Pacquiao's KO of De La Hoya, 1.25 million buys) or the brutality of what had been this year's top seller (Pacquiao's second-round KO of Hatton, 850,000).

But Golden Boy rolled out the red carpet for Mayweather's return. Significant rebates were offered with Tecate beer purchases. HBO unveiled a new digital marketing strategy, tapping into social networking sites to find younger viewers and saturating the landscape with video content instead of the excessive traditional advertising. The network reached out to urban sites to find Mayweather fans. A prefight show was shown nationwide on Fox Sports Net for the first time via loop for several weeks leading up to the event.

Early last week, executives at Golden Boy estimated buys would be approximately 750,000. After the fight, however, Golden Boy CEO Richard Schaefer raised the stakes as he confidently predicted it would exceed one million.

He was correct.

"It's an incredible testament to the vitality of the sport, to Floyd Mayweather and the great welterweight era that's going to continue in 2009 and into 2010," said Mark Taffet, senior vice president of HBO PPV. "We're reaching new audiences. There's a continual flow of big matchups."

Junior welterweight champion Pacquiao is moving up in weight to square off with Miguel Cotto on Nov. 14, also on HBO PPV.

The success of Mayweather-Marquez — and the possibility that the winner could meet Mayweather in the near future in what probably would be the biggest fight of 2010, especially if it's the Filipino — could give Pacquiao-Cotto a bump.

"Boxing is a sequence of fights in the ring and a sequence of stories outside the ring," Taffet said. "Clearly Floyd Mayweather's great victory fuels a lot o conversation and speculation about what's next. All of the (future) matchups benefit from that."

Mayweather-Marquez also was shown via closed circuit at 170 theaters nationwide through NCM Fathom. Those figures have yet to be reported by co-promoter Golden Boy.