Arum to announce Pacquiao’s June 9th opponent next week; expected to be Cotto

By Chris Williams: According to Mike Marley at examiner.com, Bob Arum will be making an announcement for Manny Pacquiao’s next opponent this coming week and it’s expected to be WBA junior middleweight champion Miguel Cotto, not Floyd Mayweather Jr. and the date will be June 9th.

Additionally, the fight might not occur in the new outdoor 40,000 seat Manny arena on the Las Vegas strip. It will either take place at the MGM Grand or the UNLV Thomas & Mack arena, the latter having a seating capacity of 19,522 and the former 16,800.

It appears that Arum is making adjustments to the less popular opponent for Pacquiao. If it was Mayweather, and he actually agreed to it, the Manny arena would fit a lot of fans and would likely sell out. But you can’t use that same Manny arena for a less popular opponent because it’s a waste because there likely won’t be enough tickets sold to fill half of the arena. Arum is better off using the MGM or the Thomas & Mack arena.

Arum said this in examiner.com Marley interview: “Mayweather said he won’t agree to a 50-50 split with Manny. Now that’s something blocking the fight, something we won’t agree to.”

Arum went on to say he has never heard from Mayweather’s management representatives Al Haymon or Leonard Ellerbe to sit and talk about the date for the fight. Arum obviously has already picked out the venue himself by having it built especially for the fight.

I’m not sure why he did that without speaking to them first because that’s a little presumptuous that Mayweather and his team would automatically fall in line for that venue.

Arum said he’d like to get the 50-50 purse split taken care of now and all the other negotiation particulars so that everything would be in place for a November Pacquiao-Mayweather fight. He thinks that by fans realizing that Pacquiao’s June 9th fight and Mayweather’s May 5th fight are leading to a November Pacquiao-Mayweather showdown, it would make those interim fights bigger. Unfortunately that’s wishful thinking on Arum’s part because I can’t see them agreeing on anything.