Evander Holyfield and Lennox Lewis no longer hold the record gate for Madison Square Garden.
That honour now lies with Conor McGregor and Eddie Alvarez, the two men who will headline UFC 205 in New York City.
We always suspected that Saturday night’s monster card was set to eclipse the previous record at the Garden but we’ve only just received an actual figure on the ticket sales.
Bloomberg reports that the UFC’s New York City debut has sold more than $17 million worth of tickets at the box office, shattering the previous record of $11 millon which was set when Holyfield and Lewis battled to a draw in the iconic arena in 1999.
Even accounting for inflation, Holyfield vs. Lewis still comes in behind UFC 205.
The November 12 event also exceeds the $12 million gate record for the UFC, which was set at UFC 129 in 2011 at Toronto’s Rogers Centre, and will take some beating moving forward.
“I wanted to make sure when we went to New York, we delivered,” UFC president Dana White recently said on Fox. “It’s the biggest, baddest card we’ve ever done in the history of the company.”
With three title fights on the card, it’s hard to argue with White… Which is a sentence not often uttered.
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