Image courtesy of Top Rank Promotions
Ramirez/Ancajas doubleheader averages less than 750K viewers
Top Rank’s show Saturday night didn’t attract nowhere near the viewers its last ESPN card did. Surely this comes as no surprise to anyone involved.
The doubleheader featuring Gilberto Ramirez and Jerwin Ancajas in separate fights averaged 741,000 viewers, according to ratings released Tuesday by Nielsen Media Research. Top Rank’s last ESPN offering of 2017, headlined by Vasyl Lomachenko and Guillermo Rigondeaux, averaged 1.73 million viewers December 9th and peaked well over 2 million.
In all honesty you probably could’ve put this card on about any channel in any time slot and it probably wouldn’t have done much better. The matchups simply were not too good nor did the card have a “big name” fighter.
The headliner Ramirez is an undefeated super middleweight world champion but he was fighting a guy in Habib Ahmed that although ranked #4 by the WBO was virtually unknown to the purist of fans and even most boxing insiders. When I say virtually unknown I mean it was so bad that you couldn’t even find any YouTube footage of Ahmed’s fights. I finally found an amateur fight late Friday evening that somehow just appeared after weeks of finding absolutely nothing.
In the first half of the doubleheader Ancajas was able to win his one-sided affair against Israel Gonzalez as easy in the ring as it was on paper. Ancajas who as a Filipino southpaw draws a lot of comparisons to superstar Manny Pacquiao. While there may be some similarities Ancajas was making his American debut and it takes more to earn viewers than simply a comparison to an all-time great especially in a division as unfamiliar to the casual fan as super flyweight no matter how great us purist know the division is.
Sometimes, well actually 90% of the time viewers turn up for good cards and this simply wasn’t that. You reap what you sow Bob, that’s just how it is.
By: Chris Henderson
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