On an extremely busy night of boxing, Terence Crawford vs. Felix Diaz reigned supreme in the boxing television ratings battle between HBO and Showtime.
According to ratings released by Nielsen Media Research, Crawford vs. Diaz headlined the May 20 edition of HBO Championship Boxing and pulled in an average 961,000, peaking at 1.036 million viewers. The fight, which took place at Madison Square Garden in New York City, saw an increase of 19% for the 29-year-old Crawford from his previous fight on HBO against John Molina Jr., which averaged 806,000 viewers last December.
Crawford vs. Diaz was HBO's most successful night of 2017 in terms of television ratings. The previous high for HBO this year was the Vasyl Lomachenko vs. Jason Sosa which had a peak audience of 886,000 and an average viewership of 832,000 on April 8.
Crawford retained his unified light welterweight titles with a 10th round TKO victory over Diaz, Crawford's fifth consecutive light welterweight title defense.
In the co-feature bout on the Crawford-Diaz card, the non-title lightweight bout between Raymundo Beltran vs. Jonathan Maicelo averaged 687,000 viewers with a peak of 723,000 viewers. Beltran knocked out Maicelo in the second round of their encounter.
