We can’t afford this can’t-miss pay-per-view bout
The Morning File has always figured there were several sound reasons to have lots of friends. Chief among them is attracting a large crowd to your funeral, ensuring as your final act that you will really impress those still living and leave most of them feeling inferior.
Even better, however, is that if you have enough friends, it’s potentially affordable to watch really significant pay-per-view events. The issue arises now because of next Saturday’s muchhyped “Fight of the Century” (until the next “Fight of the Century,” a year or two from now) in Las Vegas between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao.
If you figure viewing the fight should cost no more than $1 — which seems reasonable, since it might last just a minute or two — then you just need to invite 99 friends over who are also willing to contribute $1 each to cover the fight’s pay-perview cost approaching $100.
It’s a good plan, other than the need to somehow come up with about 90 more friends than currently exist in the next week. That’s no easy task for someone middle-aged who’s only been acquiring new friends at the rate of about one a year, now that so much of the potential good-friend universe is already spoken for.
If four score or so new friends don’t materialize, we’re going to feel guilty for not helping support this event, considering all the efforts by Mr. Mayweather, Mr. Pacquiao, HBO, Showtime and others to put it together for us. Mr. Mayweather is expected to be the biggest beneficiary; he might earn as much as $200 million for no more than 36 minutes of work. (And you thought UPMC executives were overpaid.) We won’t be able to live with ourselves if we ignore the event and a boxer ends up with barely $199,999,900.
If we’d known prize-fighting could be so lucrative, we might have made a different career choice early in life. Sure, boxing is punishing, and it hurts to get hit — if we recall correctly from high school — but you get over it ... usually. Mr. Mayweather’s going to be struck about 200 times if it’s a typical fight (somehow boxers’ punches connect with air as frequently as a body) so he might receive $1 million per blow. Not bad for a night’s work.
(Note to pugnacious readers: If someone wants to offer $1 million to punch me after reading any edition of The Morning File that you really, really hate, such as this one, I believe we can work out a deal.)
By one measure, spending $100 on pay-per-view of the fight is quite a bargain. The face value of the tickets that sold out in two minutes to see it live at the MGM Grand cost between $1,500 and $7,500. And when we checked StubHub over the weekend, prices ranged from about $5,000 to $109,196.87.
We then spent the rest of the weekend wondering who might consider spending $109,196.87 to see a boxing match. Any pragmatic person exploring StubHub’s website further would have quickly realized they could put 10 friends (a realistic number, fortunately) for that same total in the best available seats for the June 20 Rolling Stones concert at Heinz Field. What’s more, you’re pretty well assured, unlike the fight, that nothing is going to stop the concert after just a few minutes. That’s assuming the Hell’s Angels don’t show up, of course.
On the other hand, we’ve heard that the electricity felt in the arena by fans attending a major prize fight surpasses that of any other sporting event. We’re just going to have to take someone’s word for that. This writer experienced shivers up his spine over the winter watching a guy we didn’t know two lanes over from us bowl eight consecutive strikes on a Saturday afternoon in Mt. Lebanon. Nothing’s likely to top that thrill for us, and it didn’t cost a cent to watch. (Nice game, by the way, Walt.)
Some people, obviously, just feel a need to be part of any big event, and that’s understandable. They can’t wait to tell co-workers on Monday that they saw this once-in-a-lifetime event (until the next one, a year or two later) live, or at least in real time, when the majority of schmos could only read about it or see a taped replay days later. And that’s their right, if that’s how they want to spend their money.
I think it’d be a better investment, however, acquiring a lot of friends to impress people at a funeral.