Arum says he doesn’t know if the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight will happen now

By Boxing News - 10/09/2010 - Comments

By Matt Stein: Top Rank promoter Bob Arum now questions whether the mega fight between unbeaten Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Arum’s fighter Manny Pacquiao is going to happen due to the legal problems that Mayweather is now going through. In an article at the Ocregister.com, Arum says “With all the legal problems and after that ridiculous, racist rant [referring to the video Mayweather put together on the internet], I don’t know if it happens. It certainly looks like Floyd doesn’t want to fight him. I just think he would feel a lot of emotional trauma if he lost his zero.”

Whatever the problem that’s holding Mayweather back, he needs to get over and quick before Pacquiao retires or gets beaten by someone else. Pacquiao is quickly running out of fighters to beat in boxing, and he’s not going to be sticking around forever. Arum has Pacquiao matched up against his Top Rank fighter Antonio Margarito on November 13th. After that, Pacquiao will likely be facing Miguel Cotto again in a rematch.

At that point, Pacquiao will have exhausted the top fighters in boxing for him to compete against unless Mayweather is willing to step up and fight him. There’s a chance that Pacquiao could fight Paul Williams, but that’s still not a huge fight. If anything, it would likely bring in similar numbers to Pacquiao-Margarito and Pacquiao vs. Joshua Clottey. Williams has a long ways to before he becomes a pay per view star, and he may not ever be one because he slaps too much with his punches and doesn’t look over powering.

Mayweather hasn’t fought since last May when he defeated Shane Mosley. Mayweather said he didn’t want to fight for the remainder of this year, so hopefully he’ll be interested in stepping foot in the ring next year to fight Pacquiao. If not, then it’s likely that Pacquiao and Mayweather will never fight. It’s not surprising that Mayweather hasn’t fought Pacquiao, because Floyd has become risk aversive as he’s aged. Most of his big fights came against fighters that he had a big advantage over and many of these fights happened earlier in his career. Mayweather has never fought Margarito, Miguel Cotto, Andre Berto, and didn’t fight Mosley until Shane was nearing 40. If you look at Mayweather’s track record, it’s really not surprising that he hasn’t fought Pacquiao.



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