Like many others, I’ve been vocal about how the UFC needs to step up its fight promotion game given HBO’s 24/7 series. The difference was especially striking to me following the Mayweather/De la Hoya series and then the Mayweather/Hatton series. As it turns out, the key to these shows was Mayweather, not the multi-part feature.
I watched the build to Jones and Calzaghe on HBO, and the epic narraration and music just felt forced. The classic narrative from the first Mayweather series of this big mouthed kid against the legend that would shut him up just wasn’t there. The show ended up doing 225,000 buys, or so I thought, Ron Borges over at The Sweet Science says it did under 200,000.
I feel the same way watching the current series with Oscar and Manny. The Manny stuff is fascinating, the Oscar stuff is boring, and they have very little material to work with when it comes to building a narrative for the fight. I knew they were forcing it when the narrarator described Freddie Roach’s car and Manny’s dog in his normal epic tone. Obviously this card is going to do big numbers, but I think it’s more because Oscar is a gigantic star and Manny has his own drawing base, not because of anything the show has done.
I’ve heard so many reasons why there was no 3 part series for Lesnar/Couture that it makes my head spin, but Dave Meltzer says they had a ton of material, enough for 3 different shows, suggesting they could have done a three part series, but chose not to. Perhaps the narrative just wasn’t there to carry it. Brock Lesnar was not his normal trash talking self leading into this fight, both men were humble and complimentary towards the other, and the actual countdown special they did was honestly nothing special at all. If that was their best stuff, I do not think a 3 part series would have helped anything.
They are going to do their first series of the kind in January for Penn and St. Pierre, and it will be very interesting to see how they push that fight. Penn knows how to hype fights though, and he understands how important it is, so I expect him to try to ham it up for the cameras. They’re rumored to be working with excellent people on it, and they’re spending a lot to do it right. There’s no guarantee it will do much to help either, three parts is not enough on its own.