Antonio Tarver and Roy Jones Jr. saved their best for last, at least from a pay-per-view perspective.
While the rubber match between the two wasn’t an epic inside the ring, the Oct. 1 fight generated the best PPV performance of the trilogy with 405,000 buys.
The event -- in which Tarver earned a unanimous-decision win over Jones -- bested the 304,000 buys for Jones’ November 2003 win and the 382,000 for Tarver’s May 2004 second-round knockout win over Jones.
The fight -- which retailed at a suggested price of $49.95 -- also ranks second among all pay-per-view boxing events in 2005 behind only the 510,000 buys garnered by Home Box Office PPV's May 14 Felix Trinidad-Winky Wright fight.
Up next for HBO PPV is a Nov. 12 Hasim Rahman-Vitali Klitschko card, followed Dec. 3 by a rematch fight between middleweight champion Jermain Taylor and former title-holder Bernard Hopkins.
Boxing fans, though, won’t have to wait until November to satisfy their PPV fix. Showtime Oct. 8 will distribute a rematch bout between Diego Corrales and Jose Luis Castillo. Corrales won the brutal first fight between the two lightweights in what many boxing observers have called the fight of the year.
