Pacquiao - Clottey Update

Jerry Jones was one of the nearly 70,000 people who packed the New Orleans Superdome to watch the 1978 heavyweight title fight between Muhammad Ali and Leon Spinks.
The energy of the massive crowd, the roars cascading down from the upper deck and the sense of being part of something so big and grand has never left him. The Dallas Cowboys owner has seen fights everywhere from the Las Vegas Strip to small halls in his native Arkansas. Each is unique, he says.
Yet, as you might expect with Jones, now the prototypical Texan, bigger just always felt better.
“The larger the crowd, the more impact every punch, every tackle, is,” he said Monday. “It magnifies every act in sports.”
Jones is bringing “big” back to boxing Saturday when his new Cowboys Stadium hosts the Manny Pacquiao-Joshua Clottey welterweight title fight. In doing so, he is making a move to reconnect the sport with its mostly blue-collar base, 45,000 fans at a time.
It’s not often you build a palatial, $1 billion-plus facility and are hailed as a man of the people. But that’s what’s happening.
There’s nothing quite like the electricity of a big fight in Vegas. There, however, the high costs of tickets and travel have made it something only the well-heeled can experience. Fight weekend is mostly geared to the wealthy.
This is different.
The fight is in suburban Arlington, Texas, smack dab in the middle of the nearly seven-million-population Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex and centrally located to millions more in the nation’s second largest state.
Jones has set up the seating configuration for 45,000. Tickets are as low as $50, and with 40,000 sold, according to Top Rank, some are still available. If they sell out, officials can add more seats to keep the secondary market from soaring.
While fifty bucks is nothing to brush off, it’s fairly reasonable considering it’s a chance to see the world’s best pound-for-pound fighter live. If this fight was taking place in, say, the 12,000-seat Mandalay Bay Events Center in Vegas, the cheapest tickets would have gone for about $150 – and those would’ve been snapped up quickly.
“It doesn’t take a mathematician to realize the more numbers you put into the building, the less you have to charge,” Jones said.
“We’re excited about the makeup of our fan base,” he added, noting the region’s large Hispanic community.
Jones built his stadium to bring any number of events to Texas. He’s already hosted an NFL season, major college football games and a six-figure crowd to watch the NBA All-Star game. Boxing is just one of them, but it’s special to him. In 1984, his pre-Cowboys days, he even promoted a fight in Little Rock.
“One of the early renditions of the interior [of the stadium] had the seats around a boxing ring,” he said.
It was one of the reasons he installed the signature 11,520-square-foot high-definition television screen above the field of play. It can be raised and lowered based on the event. Saturday, it’ll hang 40 feet above the ring and assure that anyone inside the building will see every bit of the action.
“Every time a bead of sweat pops up on the shoulder of Manny Pacquiao or Joshua Clottey,” Jones said, “everyone is going to see it as clear – or clearer – than someone sitting in the first row of seats.”

David Mikael Taclino
Inyu Web Development and Design
Creative Writer

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