Let the games begin," Top Rank promoter Bob Arum chortled into the phone on Thursday.
Arum was talking about the competition he is about to face from the Ultimate Fighting Championship, which has its first free event under its new deal with Fox coming on Nov. 12 at 9 p.m. ET -- directly against the HBO PPV card that Arum is promoting. You know the one, right? The one headlined by pound-for-pound king Manny Pacquiao, who defends his welterweight title against Juan Manuel Marquez in the main event in their long-awaited third showdown.
Early Thursday, Fox and UFC announced the deal -- widely reported to be for seven years and worth about $100 million annually -- that will move the mixed martial arts promoter's events to the Fox family of television networks from Spike and Versus.
While the Fox's coverage of the UFC event will go head-to-head with the pay-per-view's first hour, UFC officials said it will be over by the time the actual Pacquiao-Marquez bout begins.
The biggest part of the deal in terms of exposure is that Fox -- which airs in more than 100 million homes and regularly carries sports events such as the Super Bowl and World Series -- will carry four events per year, including the first one opposite Arum's Pacquiao-Marquez III pay-per-view.
"They're just being fair and balanced," Arum quipped, using the catchphrase of Fox News Channel.
Believe him or not, but Arum says he thinks the move will actually benefit the boxing pay-per-view event.
"I think it helps it because there will be a lot of talk about it, and people who follow boxing and love boxing are gonna vote with their dollars," he said. "We're going to rally the base. We've got all the Democrats and Independents. They'll all be watching boxing."
So does Arum think the Fox/UFC move was by design?
"Of course. It's not an accident," he said. "Let the games begin."
Arum said he believes Fox will use the deal with the UFC to pressure cable operators to add their smaller networks, such as Fuel, which will carry UFC programming.
"We welcome the competition," he said. "That's what we thrive on."
But in the next breath, Arum said he wasn't concerned and didn't view a free UFC event airing opposite a boxing pay-per-view as serious competition.
"As far as we're concerned, it is irrelevant," Arum said.
Does it mean he will beef up the undercard for the Pacquiao-Marquez PPV to give consumers more bang for their buck?
"We were always planning a tremendous, quality event," he said. "It's going to be an unbelievable undercard, with pizzazz and great fights -- the same type of shows we've been putting on for Pacquiao fights. Of course, we still have to finalize everything with the fights. We don't want to announce it piecemeal."
Arum said he would wait to announce the undercard until after the Sept. 17 Floyd Mayweather Jr.-Victor Ortiz HBO PPV card, which he is not promoting.
Arum didn't say where he got his statistics from, but he claimed that less than 5 percent of the viewers who watch UFC also watch boxing, so it wouldn't have an impact on the PPV.
"There is no competition," he said. "If Fox was to put on a top movie that night, it might be more competition. If Fox put on Manchester United that night, it would be more competition."
Arum said the mere notion of a competition, however, would "energize cable systems to really go full bore [to promote the PPV] because the 800-pound gorilla [Fox] has thrown a dare at them trying to hurt them" by putting the free UFC event on against Pacquiao-Marquez.
Cable systems generally reap nearly half the gross television revenue from a pay-per-view event, giving them incentive to heavily market the biggest events, such as a fight involving Pacquiao.
"If Showtime put on a big [boxing] card against us, that would be cause for concern and get me really pissed off," Arum said. "Not this."
Source: espn.go.com
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