Gennady Golovkin’s pay-per-view drawing abilities may not be as great as one would hope, if reports are true.
According to Lance Pugmire of the Los Angeles Times, Golovkin’s middleweight title defense against Daniel Jacobs had about 130,000-150,000 pay-per-view buys. Below are Pugmire’s tweets on the numbers.
If those numbers are true, then those numbers are similar to Golovkin's only other HBO pay-per-view that he headlined. He drew 150,000 buys for his bout against David Lemieux at Madison Square Garden in 2015.
It has been a down era in HBO boxing pay-per-views. The Andre Ward vs. Sergey Kovalev light heavyweight title unification bout only sold 160,000 buys back in November 2016.
Golovkin defeated Jacobs to retain his belts via unanimous decision in a pay-per-view that was also headlined by Roman "Chocolatito" Gonzalez suffering his first loss as a professional boxer and losing his WBC super flyweight title against Srisaket Sor Rungvisai.
HBO's next boxing pay-per-view will be Canelo Alvarez vs. Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. in a non-title bout on May 6. Canelo has never headlined a pay-per-view that had less than 300,000 buys. His highest buyrate was when he headlined a 2013 pay-per-view bout against Floyd Mayweather and that card had 2.2 million buys.
