THE PRICE IS WRONG

You can watch the second and third rounds of the NFL draft on TV on Friday night and see rounds four through seven on Saturday. You can watch the 141^st Kentucky Derby on Saturday. It’s free (other than what you may be paying your cable or satellite provider).

And, on Saturday night, you can watch the long-awaited welterweight title fight between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao. That’s not free. It’s anything but free. It’s either $90 (standard definition) or $100 (high definition) to bring this special event into your home.

OK, everyone has been waiting for this fight. A bit too long. OK, five years too long. But now it is the biggest money fight in history. It is expected to gross, with those preposterous pay-per-view fees, $300 million. I like my furniture, but I’m not prepared to pay $100 to sit on it.

Some people make a party out of these boxing spectacles. They invite a few friends over, have them chip in, and then they only pay $20 or so … to sit on their own furniture. In this case, it is to see two older fighters – Pacquiao is 36, Mayweather is 38 – do what they should have done when they were in their primes.

The NFL draft goes on and on, and most of it is analysis and conversation. You won’t blink and miss anything. The Kentucky Derby takes about two minutes. The fight will start, well, whenever they get around to it. There are preliminary bouts, of course, and then the main event. And as the card is taking place in Las Vegas, folks on the East Coast will be up mighty late. The fight could go 12 rounds or 30 seconds, and there’s no refund if it’s quick.

Pay your money and make your choices. Or don’t pay. Coughing up $100 to stay home seems just a little too weird. If it’s free, it’s for me.
 
 
Post By: Larry Weisman, a longtime sportswriter for USA TODAY, blogs for Twistity.com. Follow him on Twitter @MrLarryWeisman .