Promoter Don King often jokes that he has been blamed for every disaster in history, from the San Francisco earthquake to the Johnstown flood.
But one thing that King didn't want to be blamed for was the over-inflated ticket prices for the Roy Jones, Jr.-Felix Trinidad match at the Garden Saturday night. Front-row seats for the fight were initially priced at $15,000, with second row going for $12,500, third row $10,000 and fourth row $7,500.
"I had nothing to do with that. That was all done by Madison Square Garden," King said. "It was a big mistake."
Even though slightly less than 400 tickets were priced at the higher rate, the sticker shock had a trickle-down effect and sent a chill through the market. That, coupled with the fact that the fight lacked pizzazz, made it a tough sell.
The Garden dropped the price of the tickets on Tuesday, hoping to salvage the event, but the premium seats were still going for $5,000. No one at the Garden would comment on the thinking behind the pricing for Jones-Trinidad.
Perhaps their thinking was influenced by the way tickets sold for the Floyd Mayweather-Ricky Hatton fight on Dec. 8 in Las Vegas. It was a hot fight, with few tickets offered to the general public. Scalpers were getting upwards of $20,000 for ringside seats. But those prices were driven by Brits who came over from England to support Hatton, who hails from Manchester, and didn't have tickets. That market didn't exist for Jones-Trinidad.
King said he was not involved in scaling the prices for tickets because the Garden bought the show from him for $8.5 million. Some executives at the Garden had balked at that price, thinking it was not going to be profitable enough for the arena. King circumvented them and went directly to Charles and James Dolan, the Cablevision magnate and Garden chairman, respectively, and struck the deal.
After making the deal with King, James Dolan came back to his Garden executives and told them to make it work for the arena. Their idea was to scale the premium seats at a higher rate to help recoup the site fee that was given to King. Besides the highest-price tickets, there were 10 different price levels, with the cheapest being $100.
King promoted the show heavily, but primarily because he wanted to increase the HBO Pay-Per-View sales, of which he has a cut.
The prices for Jones-Trinidad were wildly out of whack compared with the most recent successful shows at the Garden involving Miguel Cotto, another Puerto Rican boxing icon. The tickets for Cotto-Zab Judah last June were priced from $500 for ringside to $50 for the least expensive seats. The fight was a sellout, with 20,658 in attendance. Cotto-Shane Mosley drew 17,135, with ringside going for $750 and the cheapest ticket being $50. Ringside tickets for the upcoming heavyweight unification match between IBF champ Wladimir Klitschko and WBO champ Sultan Ibragimov are $1,000.
The Garden needed Jones-Trinidad to be a blockbuster at the box office to make a profit. That wasn't going to happen. And King, who already had $8.5 million in the bank, didn't want to take the blame for that.
CALZAGHE IN VEGAS: It looks like a deal to bring Joe Calzaghe to the U.S. to fight Bernard Hopkins has been finalized. The fight, April 19 in Las Vegas and on HBO, will be just the third outside of England for Calzaghe, the 168-pound king. Promoter Frank Warren has scheduled a press conference in London for Tuesday for a major announcement on Calzaghe's next fight. ... Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Oscar De La Hoya are talking about a rematch in September. Their first fight did a record at the gate and on Pay-Per-View. Mayweather beat De La Hoya in the first fight and after what Mayweather did to Hatton (10th-round KO), it's obvious that Mayweather-De La Hoya II is merely a money grab.
BY TIM SMITH
DAILY NEWS SPORTS WRITER
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