While Jim Lampley once claimed he “felt terrible” for anyone who spent any amount of money to watch Floyd Mayweather vs. Manny Pacquiao, he is now using it as an example to prove that UFC will never be able to produce an event on that level.
Lampley appeared on the Bill Simmons podcast and spoke about his belief that UFC is promoting in the wrong fashion if they want to have the “super event” type pay-per-views.
“[UFC] make the top people fight against the top people,” Lampley told Simmons. “It’s more like the NFL model where any given Sunday top guys are going to fight top guys. But of course what that eliminates for them is the pinnacle event. When everybody has four to five losses you can’t put together Mayweather-Pacquiao because the public wants to see people rise up way above the normal universe and then get together in some sort of summit meeting and that’s when you get the million buy Pay-Per-View, or in the case with Mayweather-Pacquiao the 4.4 million buy PPV.”
Lampley continued, “UFC will never be able to construct an event like that as long as they use the model they’re using. I’m not saying it’s wrong. I think there are intelligent reasons for them to do what they do but we’re always going to have the bigger showcase events when they happen.”
Simmons pointed out that UFC holds far more consistently high-level events, a point that Lampley refused to go with, as he had to offer his biased-boxing counter point of view.
“That’s why they’re doing so well,” Lampley responded. “It’s a lesser amount of rounds and shorter rounds and it’s more violent so it suits cyber-era attention spans better than the 12-round fight does. There are a lot of reasons why for young people at this moment the UFC is probably more popular that boxing, but we’re not going away.
“We’re not evaporating from the landscape. We still have a certain cache which goes with 125 years of gloved prize fighting existence and all the socio-political impact that our fighters have had.”