Junior middleweight boxing champion Oscar De La Hoya proved that his boxing
skills and his pay-per-view appeal are still intact as his impressive Sept. 14
knockout of rival Fernando Vargas drew 900,000 PPV buyers.
Home Box Office PPV's De La Hoya-Vargas bout was the second-most-successful
nonheavyweight fight in PPV history behind the 1999 De La Hoya-Felix Trinidad
bout, which drew 1.2 million PPV buys.
Cable subscribers represented 550,000 of the fight's total buys, while
350,000 direct-broadcast satellite viewers purchased the event. Overall, the
fight -- with its suggested retail price of $45.95 -- pulled in around $40
million in PPV revenue.
Combined with the $103 million garnered from the June 2002 Lennox Lewis-Mike
Tyson fight, the industry has already reached its highest yearly
PPV-boxing-revenue total since 1999.
'With a great combination of a left hand from De La Hoya and a right hand by
Lennox Lewis, 2002 has turned out to be one of the biggest PPV knockouts in
years,' HBO senior vice president of sports operations Mark Taffet said.
'I think that De La Hoya gave us a career-defining performance against one of
the most exciting and courageous fighters in Fernando Vargas,' Taffet added.
'Once again, the PPV performance proves that when great fighters take great
fights, subscribers will respond.'
