Going into Saturday’s big, big fight between unbeaten stars Gervonta Tank Davis and Ryan Garcia, Oscar De La Hoya stated how he would be “highly disappointed” if the fight did not break the 2.4 million pay-per-view buys his mega-fight with Floyd Mayweather pulled in back in 2007. Well, although this past Saturday’s fight didn’t beat the PPV numbers “The World Awaits” fight pulled in, reports say the fight did very well all the same.
As per a story from Essentially Sports, source r/Boxing reports how the Davis-Garcia fight brought in “between 1.3 and 1.4 million” PPV buys. If this is true, it’s a huge number, and one that presents a stiff argument to those people who say PPV is “dead” or “dying.” 1.4 million PPV buys is huge these days, what with all the illegal streams that are out there and with people everywhere struggling to make ends meet financially.
And the Davis-Garcia fight was not cheap, not at $84.95, it wasn’t. Yet the fight was a smash hit (again, according to the source Essentially Sports has gone by).
Going into the fight, De La Hoya, and others, said the winner of the fight would become ‘The Face of Boxing.” Now that he’s shown he can, with the right dance partner, shift well over 1 million PPV buys, Tank Davis may well be The Face of Boxing. Tank may well be the biggest lower-weight star out there today.
De La Hoya was really reaching when he suggested the Davis-Garcia fight was capable, in fact more than capable, of topping 2.4 million PPV buys, yet the fight was capable of topping the magic million target.
How big can Tank become in the future, and might one of his fights top 2 million PPV buys in the years to come? Again, Tank had a great dance partner in Garcia; a fighter who has a massive following on social media, many of these people no doubt buying Saturday’s fight. But if Tank fights, say, a Shakur Stevenson this year or next year, and if the fight is promoted to the fullest, with the biggest degree of hype possible, who knows. Maybe the 2 million target will be hit.
