By Jason Kim: Dan Rafael of ESPN reports that Bob Arum, the promoter of World Boxing Organization welterweight champion Manny Pacquiao, isn’t interested in matching Pacquiao up with stars like Timothy Bradley and Paul Williams because Arum thinks they’re not well known enough by boxing fans, and he doesn’t want to give them a “free ride” by helping their careers by pitting them with his number #1 star Pacquiao. Arum says this about the talented unbeaten Bradley:

“Bradley is a tremendous fighter and he’s a great young man, but the problem with a guy like Tim Bradley is that even though you and I know what a superb fighter he is. The public really doesn’t know…We spend hundreds of thousands of dollars building up our fighters and publicizing them. The other promoters don’t really promote their fighters. They take money from HBO or Showtime or a little Indian casino and they think they’re doing the kid a big service. I’m not going to give them a free ride on the work we have done.”

As such, Arum, in a nutshell, gives his rational for not putting Pacquiao in with Paul Williams or Bradley. Instead, boxing fans get to see Pacquiao fight Arum’s Top Rank fighters Miguel Cotto and/or Antonio Margarito. It doesn’t matter that Pacquiao has already beaten Cotto last year, he’ll likely be facing him soon. If not this November, you can bet he’ll be facing Cotto again next year.

It wouldn’t be a big deal if it the original Cotto-Pacquiao fight had been competitive. Fans would be pleased to see a rematch or two between them. But the fight was one-sided after the 4th round, and there’s really no point in having a second, third or however many fights that Arum wants to have Pacquiao and Cotto fight together.

It’s not interesting. Frankly, it seems kind weird and out of place. It makes it look as if Arum has a small farm team and instead of having them play other teams, he’s going to have them play each other all the time because he put the money into making them famous.

However, when you just have them playing each other and exclude other talented fighters, it gets old and stale very fast. Pacquiao is likely to fight Margarito next, and that’s about as bad a choice as Cotto. Margarito was a popular fighter a couple of years ago, which is when Arum should have matched him against Pacquiao. But the loss to Shane Mosley last year, in which Margarito was totally dominated and stopped, pretty much took the air out of Margarito’s career. And the hand wrap scandal made matters even worse for Margarito. He came back from his year suspension to beat someone named Roberto Garcia, but Margarito looked nothing like the same fighter he was two years ago. His power was seemingly gone, and his whole fighting style has changed from that of a slugger to that of a boxer. It looks weird on Margarito, and he seems much less interesting to watch now. I think a fight between Margarito and Pacquiao is better than the last fight that Pacquiao had against fellow Top Rank fighter Joshua Clottey, but not much better.

I see a Margarito-Pacquiao fight as non-pay per view bout. Of course, Arum is certainly going to have that be a PPV fight, but I don’t think Margarito has proven himself worthy of a fight against Pacquiao right now.

If he had beaten a couple of good contenders after serving his year suspension, I would feel a lot better about a fight between Pacquiao and Margarito. But Arum seems to be rushing Margarito into a fight with Pacquiao, if nothing else because Arum has few other options to match Pacquiao up against in his Top Rank team.

I mean he can’t put Clottey back in with Pacquiao, because he just beat Clottey in March in a hopelessly one-sided fight. And besides Cotto, there’s only Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. that boxing fans have any knowledge about. A fight between Chavez Jr. and Pacquiao would be horrible to watch for boxing fans, because Chavez Jr. has little experience, and has fought no one of substance other than another Tank Rank fighter John Duddy.