De La Hoya still has the magical ability to rake you over the coals ... hey, let's get a picture of his statue again outside Staples Center

At $54.95 a pop, and Oscar De La Hoya's guarantee that he'd put on a marvelous showing Saturday night against Manny Pacquiao -- maybe even win -- HBO PPV numbers that came in this morning reveal that the company had 1.25 million buys. That's about $70 million bucks in the bank for a fight that ended with Oscar sitting on his stool unable to get up before the ninth round.

Listening to an interview with Tony Bruno last night on KLAC-AM (570), Pacquiao trainer Freddie Roach said that he heard the fight topped 2 million buys, with projections beforehand hoping to hit 1.5 million.

Either Freddie has bad sources, or someone didn't do the right math. In this case, the fight actually came under projections. And no where near 2 mil. And clearly, not even close to what De La Hoya drew in another disappointing effort against Floyd Mayweather Jr. (2.4 mil.) last year.

The 1.25 million buy total last Saturday still is the highest performing pay-per-view event in 2008, at a time when many MMA events are pulling money away from the sport of boxing. It is only the fourth time in boxing pay-per-view history that a non-heavyweight event has attained the 1 million buy mark. We're just regurgitating what the press release says here.

For those who need to see the gruesome details again (has Oscar's eye stopped swelling?), HBO replays it Saturday at 1:45 p.m, and then again at 10 p.m. It's paired (during the day) with the live heavyweight title fight from Mannheim, Germany as Wladimir Klitschko meets Hasim Rahman.

Meanwhile, in a totally classless move that was not approved by the De La Hoya camp, Pacquiao was back in his native Phillipines today, receiving a carrot cake in the shape of a boxing glove from president Glorida Macapagal Arroyo in Manilla: