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Selling Snake Oil

By William Trillo
Photo-Chop: Bret “The Threat”

 

If you have seen any old western movie then you are familiar with the character of The Snake Oil Peddler: a traveling “doctor” with dubious credentials, selling some medicine usually called Snake Oil, with boisterous marketing hype, often supported by pseudo-scientific evidence, typically bogus. To increase sales, an accomplice in the crowd (a shill) would often jump up to “attest” the value of the product in an effort to provoke buying enthusiasm.

Now fast forward to this weeks Golden Boy Los Angeles press conference to announce their September 18th Staple Center fight card. As Oscar was introducing the card an elated Richard Schaefer jumped up to the podium to announce, “Breaking news! This event is now going to be fully supported by HBO Pay-Per-View including having their production and broadcast team. This reinforces the strength of this event!”

Say what you will, but if you are asking me that scene played out on Staples City View Terrace could have darn near been the exact script from some old “Gunsmoke” script. Now all this scene needs to be complete is a few suckers to buy some of what “The Good Doctor” is selling. If history tells us anything they will and that’s most likely why HBO was willing to put their “Seal of Approval” on this less than Championship night.

The card is headlined by an aging and beltless former Champ coming off the worst performance of his career vs. a fighter who has more in common with Jersey Shores “Snookie” than he does with the rest of the fighters on the card.

All one can really hope for is that the ticket prices of a mere $200 for a ringside seat and other seats as low as $20 will be indicative of what the price of this PPV card will be.

If that’s the case the PPV feed should be around $9.95 with Tecate paying you back twofold if you buy a case of their “Cerveza Con Carácter”.

For more boxing truth check out www.Pound4Pound.com

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 5th, 2010 at 3:09 am and is filed under Boxing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to “Selling Snake Oil”

  1. jeff taylor says:
    August 5, 2010 at 3:50 pm

    I wouldn’t pay for this on pay per view. But I do like the undercard fights and think the ticket prices are very reasonable. I’m going to have to go see this on. Good luck to Ortiz and david from OXNARD CA

  2. William Trillo says:
    August 5, 2010 at 5:58 pm

    Jeff,
    As a local fight fan I can totally understand where you are coming from. 20 bucks is a helluva price especially when you consider it would cost you more to watch it at home. Hopefully you can TIVO the Marquez/Lopez fight so you can at least see one decent fight that night.