Word: pay
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Cheating betrays that following. At a time when its fans most needs their heroes, athletes and football players and racecar drivers have to understand that their responsibilities go beyond just winning a game or collecting their massive pay check. They carry our hopes. When they cheat on the field, they cheat...
Boxing executives love to crow about the pay-per-view revenues a big fight delivers, but if you look at the numbers, it's plain to see that pay-per-view is killing boxing's cultural relevance. For example, the 2007 mega-fight between Oscar De La Hoya and Floyd Mayweather pulled in $136.6 million from pay-per-view. Yes, that's great business for the fighters, promoters, and HBO, which televised the bout. But consider: about 2.44 million households purchased that fight, a pay-per-view record. Know how many households watched WWE wrestling on the USA network...
...Wait, the boxing bigwigs tell you. Look at the total viewership figures. On average, they say, four to five people get together to watch a big pay-per-view fight in someone's living room, lowering the per-person cost for a $50 bout. Fine. Assuming that for every household that purchased De La Hoya-Mayweather, five people saw it, that's 12 million viewers - not bad. Yet, even by this optimistic measure, boxing's biggest event this decade still couldn't outdraw the audience for last week's New England Patriots-Buffalo Bills regular season game on ESPN, which...
...staging the Mayweather-Marquez bout in Las Vegas. "You know, the guy with his wife or girlfriend. Instead of going to watch a film, why not take in the fight?" Plus, some theaters are in urban areas where boxing fans are less likely to have home access to pay-per-view, and more appreciative of the cost to watch the fight: between $12-15 in the theater versus $50 on pay-per-view...
...Will this theater strategy pay off? "I give them credit, because boxing needs to try something," says Marc Ganis, president of SportsCorp LLC, a consulting firm. Overall movie theater attendance has actually risen during the recession, so the timing seems right. But Ganis worries that sports consumption has become too personalized - in the living room, on the computer, on the cell phone - for fans to abruptly change their habits. "The days when a mass audience went to movie theaters to watch a live event have come and gone," he says...