According to The Athletic's Mike Coppinger and his sources, last Saturday's Gervonta Davis-Leo Santa Cruz pay-per-view event generated between 200,000 and 225,000 buys.
That's called a success, folks, albeit a success of the qualified variety.
In the world of raw numbers (and without having reliable knowledge regarding the purses of the fighters), the show could not have been a major revenue generator. It also wasn't a money-loser, though, and that's increasingly worth noting in this present tense boxing scene.
With a crowd of 9,024 at the Alamodome in San Antonio, the Floyd Mayweather-promoted "Tank" Davis also continued his impressive run as a live gate draw in this first major U.S. boxing event to allow in-person attendance. In the fight, itself, Davis stopped Santa Cruz with a highlight reel uppercut knockout punch in the sixth round after a spirited back-and-forth battle. The Halloween night show puts Davis above 46,000 seats sold for his last four headlining events and that number would've been significantly higher if Covid-19 restrictions hadn't limited seating capacity for the Santa Cruz fight.
However, Saturday's pay-per-view still has to be viewed as only a qualified success, with expectations diminished based on the obstacles stacked up against the show.
Financial and logistical realities of a sports scene dulled and diminished by the pandemic (and fans that may be mentally fatigued from life struggles) have led to significant losses in viewership, across the board, in all sports.
In boxing, specifically, Davis-Santa Cruz was a significantly tougher sell than usual. It was one of four boxing pay-per-views scheduled to take place within a 71-day span of time during a rough pandemic-rattled economy. It had to compete for limited consumer dollars with the upcoming Mike Tyson-Roy Jones exhibition as well as the September 26 Charlo Brothers event and Errol Spence-Danny Garcia on December 5.
But, despite it all, and to add fuel to the media-suppressed "Gervonta Davis is a burgeoning star" argument, Davis' PPV show did well. Or, at least, it did well enough.
To add perspective, Floyd Mayweather's first event as a pay-per-view headliner, matched against Arturo Gatti in 2005, generated 340,000 buys. But 2005 was a way different world than 2020. Also, Gatti was very much an established star at the time and Mayweather already had several high-profile fights under his belt. Neither Davis nor Santa Cruz were hyped and spotlighted as much as Mayweather and Gatti were and, again, the sport is in a less healthy place than it was fifteen years ago.
200K-225K can definitely be built upon and there are plenty of PPV-worthy opponents for the 25-year-old Davis in the 130-140 lb. weight range, although most (such as Teofimo Lopez, Ryan Garcia, Vasiliy Lomachenko, and Devin Haney) would be tough to wrangle due to conflicting business affiliations. Seeing as how money is the great diplomat in boxing, though, a successful Davis could conceivably bring enough money to the table to entice a deal from any of Mayweather Promotions' business rivals.
"Tank is the top dog, Tank is on PPV for a reason," Mayweather said at the Davis-Santa Cruz post-fight press conference. "Tank is where he’s at for a reason. So we don’t want to come up here and call different names out...What we wanna do is let him go home, enjoy himself with his family, his daughter, his team, and then we’ll talk about that probably 20-30 days from now.
"I’m putting him in the same position so that he can do the same thing that I did — fight when he want to fight, fight who he want to fight. He’s the top dog. And he gonna keep going out there proving to the world that he is the best."
As for specifics when it comes to Davis' next PPV outing, Mayweather seemed ready to get back to business for his fighter.
"I’ll communicate with Al [Haymon], communicate with Leonard [Ellerbe], my PBC team, my Mayweather Promotions team. And we’ll sit down and talk with Showtime, Stephen Espinoza, and see what we come up with. We don’t know what the future holds, but we do know this is a future star – a big star, I should say."