Arum: Pacquiao and Marquez have lots of options for their next fights

By Boxing News - 03/14/2013 - Comments

arum4By Chris Williams: If Manny Pacquiao and Juan Manuel Marquez don’t end up facing each other in September, they still have a lot of other options available to them in terms of fights, according to their promoter Bob Arum. Their choice is to face Tim Bradley or the winner of the Mike Alvarado vs. Brandon Rios fight.

Arum said to esnewsreporting.com “Bradley or the winner of Rios-Alvarado or an immediate rematch with Marquez. It’s not up to me; it’s up to Pacquiao and Marquez…Marquez is coming to watch Bradley-Provodnikov, and then he’s going to watch Rios and Alvarado, and then he’ll come to Macau, and Manny’s in Macau, and then we’ll decide.”

I wouldn’t exactly call Bradley or the winner of Rios-Alvarado as a lot of options. Those are limited options against guys that don’t have a large following in fights where Marquez or Pacquiao will be expected to pull in fans pretty much on their own. But this is really all Arum has in his stable around those weight classes, unless he wants to throw Mike Jones and Khabib Allakhverdiev in the mix as well.

Like I said, Top Rank doesn’t have many fighters in the welterweight and light welterweight divisions for Marquez and Pacquiao to fight, so they’re stuck either fighting each other or guys like Rios, Alvarado and Bradley, none of which has proven to draw flies in terms of bringing in fans.

Marquez doesn’t have much choice. He can either fight Pacquiao and make a lot of money or fight Rios, Alvarado or Bradley and get a lot less and possibly lose to one of them. Marquez actually would be helping Arum by agreeing to fight Rios, Alvarado or Bradley because he’ll bring a lot more attention from boxing fans. I don’t see any of them ever becoming huge stars regardless of whether they face Marquez or Pacquiao, but they’ll still be helped if one of those guys fights them.

At this point we’re probably going to be looking at a series of fights between Pacquiao, Marquez, Rios, Alvarado and Bradley that could stretch out for a couple of years. I hope the boxing public likes more rematch because that’s likely what we’ll be seeing a lot of involving these fighters.



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