The fighters and their teams had been trying to work out a deal for nearly six years. Negotiations heated up during the past four months. But it took a chance encounter last month at a Miami Heat game to finally secure an agreement for the long-anticipated matchup between welterweight champs Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao.
The bout promises to be so lucrative as a pay-per-view offering that HBO and Showtime set aside their fierce rivalry to work together on the May 2 telecast. The fight is expected to clear well over $150 million and set new PPV records, which explains why Showtime and HBO put down their dukes. The moneymaking potential is so great that CBS Corp. prexy-CEO Leslie Moonves personally got involved in the negotiations between the fighters, the promoters and with his counterparts at HBO and Time Warner.
"Really the thing that made the difference was Leslie Moonves," said Showtime Sports exec VP and general manager Stephen Espinoza. "He was personally involved from the start to the finish. He brought the parties tougher in a way that I don't know if anyone else could have. He acted as the mediator who bridged the very signifiant gaps between the fighters and the promoters and two competing networks."
Espinoza compared the situation to trying to mount a Super Bowl "where everything had to be negotiated individually, from who is televising to who is the home team to who is announcing to the rules of the game and the business arrangements."
The biggest hurdle on the TV side was the fact that Mayweather has an exclusive PPV deal with Showtime while Pacquiao is exclusive to HBO. The pay cable rivals last worked together in 2002, when they faced a similar scenario with blockbuster potential with a bout between Lennox Lewis, who was under contract to HBO, and Mike Tyson, who was in Showtime's corner.
But the other obstacles to getting Mayweather and Pacquiao to face each other in the ring were still so numerous that even when the two were both under exclusive contract to HBO several years ago, the sides could not agree on the terms for a fight. That's where the persuasive power of Moonves came in, Espinoza said.
"He had a lot of conversations directly with the fighters and promoters, acting sometimes as a mediator, sometimes as a bad cop and sometimes as a good cop," he said.
Those talks were advancing slowly but surely when Mayweather and Pacquiao happened to run into each other on Jan. 27 at a Miami Heat home game. Mayweather approached Pacquiao at halftime, which marked the first time the two had spoken in years, Espinoza said. They met again after the game for a candid conversation about what it would take to get a deal done.
"They convinced each other that they were both committed to making the fight happen," Espinoza said. "That was the final impetus to getting the deal done."
The fight will be staged in Las Vegas at a venue to be announced. Details of the broadcast and the announcing team are still being hammered out. The pricetag for the PPV is also still being worked out as HBO and Showtime begin negotiations with MVPDs. But it's a safe bet that it will fetch about a $20 premium over the $65-$75 range for Mayweather's recent events.
Both networks have committed to a marketing blitz and tapping into cross-platform resources at their respective parent companies. With a pile of cash to be made in a few hours' time, both CBS and Time Warner have every incentive to hype the long-awaited meeting.
"Manny Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather have been the two most prominent fighters in the sport of boxing for the past decade, and fight fans around the world have been clamoring for them to face each other," said HBO Sports president Ken Hershman. "I know the fighters and their teams will be primed to excel and we plan to work closely with everyone involved to deliver the same level of performance from a broadcast perspective."
(Pictured: Floyd Mayweather during his bout against Marcos Maidana at Las Vegas' MGM Grand in September 2014)
© 2015 Variety Media, LLC, a subsidiary of Penske Business Media; Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC
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