Danny Garcia vs. Shawn Porter Peaks At Nearly 700,000 Viewers
Showtime’s latest boxing telecast resulted in one of the most-watched boxing fights the network has seen this year.
The main event of the September 8 Showtime Championship Boxing card from Brooklyn’s Barclays Center, a welterweight fight between Danny Garcia and Shawn Porter for the vacant WBC title, averaged 619,000 viewers. The fight, which peaked at 690,000 viewers, was the fourth-highest viewership for a Showtime-televised fight in 2018 with the other three being Mikey Garcia vs. Robert Easter Jr., Adrien Broner vs. Jessie Vargas and Deontay Wilder vs. Luis Ortiz.
Porter won an extremely narrow unanimous decision to defeat Garcia and claim his first WBC world title and second overall welterweight world title. The loss was Garcia’s second consecutive in a WBC welterweight title fight after losing to Keith Thurman in a unification fight back in March 2017.
As for the other fights on the Showtime tripleheader, Yordenis Ugas nearly swept Cesar Barrionuevo on all three judges scorecards to win a WBC welterweight title eliminator. That fight averaged 447,000 viewers and peaked at 510,000 viewers.
The opening fight on the tripleheader was a heavyweight matchup between former IBF world champion Charles Martin and undefeated contender Adam Kownacki. Kownacki defeated Martin by unanimous decision in an exciting back-and-forth bout and that fight averaged 395,000 viewers, peaking at 503,000.
Showtime also streamed on YouTube certain fights of the untelevised portion of the undercard with the top fight being Amanda Serrano’s historic WBO junior welterweight title win, making her the third boxer in history to win a world title in six weight classes. The two-hour undercard stream on YouTube currently has approximately 127,000 viewers as of September 11.
