By Eric Thomas: Oscar De La Hoya of Golden Boy Promotions is reporting that the contracts for the mega fight between World Boxing Organization welterweight champion Manny Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather Jr. are close to being finalized. Writer John Chavez of theboxingtruth.com, reports that De La Hoya has reveled that the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight is being close to being signed. De La Hoya, speaking with the Spanish television channel Univision, said “Up until now, it’s been a very difficult negotiation process for various reasons but right now we’re very close. We’re very close in finalizing the contracts that were once very complicated. The two fighters [Mayweather and Pacquiao] now realize that this fight must be made. It has to be made because the boxing fans want to see it happen and right now it’s the biggest fight that can be made in the world. It’s going to be a big, big fight. I think right now, we are very, very close in finalizing the contracts. I can’t talk right now in detail about the negotiations but I will say we are very close.”
This is sensational news for boxing fans because many of them thought that there was no talking being done at all, as Mayweather’s adviser Leonard Ellberbe had recently said there were no talks going on and that Mayweather was resting after his dominating performance over Shane Mosley in a 12 round unanimous decision on May 1st.
However, there’s still plenty that could go wrong in the negotiations. Remember last time the negotiations were very close to being completed between Mayweather and Pacquiao, but the talks reached an endpoint when the two fighters couldn’t come to an agreement over the blood testing cut off point. Mayweather wanted 14 days, whereas Pacquiao wanted the testing to stop at 24 days. The rest is history.
Pacquiao and his promoter Bob Arum ended the negotiations at that point and quickly signed to fight Joshua Clottey, another Top Rank fighter, for a fight that took place at the Cowboy Stadium in Arlington, Texas on March 13th. Pacquiao won the fight but wasn’t impressive the the pay-per-view numbers weren’t impressive either with a mere 700,000 PPV buys coming in for the fight. Those are decent numbers for lesser fighters but not for a big star like Pacquiao, who was getting much numbers until the disastrous idea to match him against the obscure Clottey was made.
Mayweather then topped the Clottey-Pacquiao fight numbers with 1.4 million PPV buy with his win over Mosley on May 1st, which seemed to put Mayweather in the driver’s seat to getting a better deal with the negotiations with Pacquiao this time around. It’ll be interesting to fight how what the purse split that they’ll be coming in with for this fight, as well as the blood testing cutoff. You would have to think that Mayweather will get a significantly larger purse split than 50% this time because of his better numbers and also get Pacquiao to come in a lot closer than the 14 days that Mayweather asked for last time. Pacquiao has already made it known that he’s willing to be tested 14 days before the fight.
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