Gennady Golovkin's PPV debut hits 150,000 sales, turns a profit

Gennady Golovkin easily took care of business inside the ring at Madison Square Garden on Saturday when he routed David Lemieux in their middleweight title unification bout. It wasn't as easy on the business side, but promoter Tom Loeffler of K2 on Thursday pronounced Triple-G's pay-per-view debut a success.

Loeffler said the fight sold slightly more than 150,000 pay-per-view units, turning a profit in Golovkin's debut. He admitted that after the quick sellout of the tickets, he got caught up in the hype and spoke publicly about exceeding 200,000, but said the promotion had budgeted for 150,000 all along.

"Golovkin-Lemieux met or exceeded every benchmark of success which was set going into the event," HBO Sports vice president Mark Taffet told Yahoo Sports. "The PPV buys solidly met expectations even amidst the Mets-Cubs national telecast registering the highest-ever TBS baseball playoff viewership including the PPV-critical markets of New York and Chicago.

This, combined with the palpable excitement of the sold-out crowd in Madison Square Garden and the in-ring performances by Gennady Golovkin and Chocolatito Gonzalez, encourage us that the next great era of boxing has begun and will continue with the highly-anticipated Cotto-Canelo megafight on Nov. 21."

In August, Yahoo Sports predicted 200,000 sales, writing, "While I could see this coming in under 200,000, I'm going to go with 200,000 as my pick. It has tough competition from Game 2 of the American League championship series, Game 1 of the National League championship series and several big college football games, including Florida-LSU, USC-Notre Dame, Michigan-Michigan State and Penn State-Ohio State. Say 200,000 with the possibility of dipping to 150,000."

The fight went head-to-head with the Mets-Cubs game as well as  college football.

"With all the ticket sales and all of the fan and media interest, I think I got a little caught up in all of that, to be honest with you, and I was talking about doing 200,000," Loeffler said. "But we needed to do 150,000 to make money on the show and it's how we budgeted and it was very good."

Loeffler, who said Golovkin became the first non-Puerto Rican this century to sell out Madison Square Garden in a boxing match when he attracted 20,548 roaring fans, did extraordinarily well around the world. He called the performance "excellent" on pay-per-view in Canada, and said it did high ratings in places like Germany, Poland, Russia and Golovkin's native Kazakhstan.

He said the show set a boxing merchandising sales record for the Garden, as well.

There was a lot of debate about the wisdom of putting the fight on HBO Pay-Per-View instead of on regular HBO, where Golovkin has turned into one of the network's biggest draws. But Loeffler said the pay-per-view results justified the decision.

"I've heard a lot of bizarre speculation that we did very poorly or that we're going to lose money, and to be honest with you, I don't know where any of that came from," Loeffler said. "We're tracking to be about a few thousand over 150,000, which is the number we were shooting for when we put this show together."

Taffet told Yahoo Sports prior to the fight that he urged Loeffler to budget his pay-per-view with 150,000 in mind.

Loeffler said that Golovkin will attend the Nov. 21 pay-per-view bout between Canelo Alvarez and Miguel Cotto at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas and hopes to fight the winner. He said he believes Golovkin would do big business against either.

He also said he is open to a fight with WBO middleweight champion Andy Lee, who fights Billy Joe Saunders on Dec. 19, as well as the winner of the WBA middleweight title fight between Daniel Jacobs and Peter Quillin.

He said because Golovkin is so active, he'll fight some on pay-per-view and some on HBO going forward.

"Gennady's not about just maxing out the money and earning every last cent," Loeffler said. "He's about building a legacy and proving who the best middleweight in the world is."

He made a great statement to that effect in the ring Saturday. It was a more modest statement on the business side, but nonetheless a winning one.