By William Mackay: Richard Schaefer was disgusted with the excuses that Top Rank promoter Bob Arum made for not wanting to match his top fighter Manny Pacquiao up against Floyd Mayweather Jr. on May 5th in Las Vegas. Just yesterday, Mayweather’s attorney’s convinced a Las Vegas judge to allow Mayweather a delay of his 90 day jail term to start on June 1st instead of January 6th in order for Mayweather to fight a huge $100 million fight against Pacquiao, one of boxing’s biggest moneymakers.
However, instead of the news of Mayweather’s jail term being greeted with joy by Arum, he said it wouldn’t change any of his plans for Pacquiao’s next fight. In other words, Arum is still going to go ahead and match Pacquiao up with one of four fighters –Timothy Bradley, Miguel Cotto, Juan Manuel Marquez and Lamont Peterson – that he has personally picked out for Pacquiao’s next fight.
Schaefer told Mlive.com “I think all the media members and fight fans, and so on, have started to get it, because some people still aren’t getting it – that Bob Arum doesn’t want that fight [Pacquiao-Mayweather]. ..When it looked like Mayweather wasn’t going to be available for May, suddenly, Pacquiao was going to fight in May. And now, suddenly, Mayweather is going to fight in May, guess what? Pacquiao isn’t available until June…I think people are starting to realize he’s [Arum] full of s***.”
It certainly does look like Arum doesn’t want any part of matching his fighter Pacquiao up with Mayweather, does it? Arum said yesterday that Pacquiao’s cut might not be ready by May 5th and he would likely need until June for it to be properly healed. That’s 7 months for it to heal.
If Arum is going to have Pacquiao wait 7 months between fights, he’s really going to be limiting how often Pacquiao can fight and that would have big time consequences to his moneymaking ability. What makes it difficult to buy into what Arum is saying is that he’s never had Pacquiao wait seven months in between fights for his cuts to heal before.
This is a first for Arum and Pacquiao, and it just happens to coincide with Mayweather badly wanting to fight Pacquiao. It just looks like Arum is ducking the Mayweather fight to protect his money fighter to keep the gravy train flowing. I’m not sure if a Pacquiao loss to Mayweather would stop the money gravy train for Arum but I guess it could lessen the paydays a little bit. But Arum his already fabulously wealthy, so it’s hard to understand why he wouldn’t want to make this fight happen while he can. Arum has to make the fight sooner or later and the longer he waits, the lesser boxing fans will care about the fight. Pacquiao is starting to slip as a fighter and if Arum can’t see that then he needs to take a closer look at Pacquiao’s last couple of fights. He’s got to put Pacquiao in with Mayweather before the Filipino gets knocked off by one of Arum’s Top Rank stable fighters. It’s going to happen sooner or later.
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