By Chris Williams: By now Top Rank promoter Bob Arum has probably heard the news that 39-year-old Juan Manuel Marquez (55-6-1, 40 KO’s) is saying that he has no interested in facing Arum’s stable fighter Manny Pacquiao for a fifth fight in September or ever.
Marquez feels that his recent 6th round knockout victory over the Filipino closes the book on their four fight series, and there’s no point in Arum trying to set up yet another fight.
Marquez says he wants either Tim Bradley or Brandon Rios, and he doesn’t want Pacquiao or WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez.
Marquez said as quoted by fightnews.com “There’s no reason for a fifth fight against Pacquiao. It was clear who. The goal we’ve already achieved. There is no longer anything pending. It’s all finalized.”
More power to Marquez for standing firm on his decision not to face Pacquiao for a fifth fight. Marquez has already proven to be the better fighter in the series, and many boxing fans believe Marquez was jobbed in the first three fights before making the decision that he needed to take the judges completely out of it in the fourth fight by knocking Pacquiao clean out.
If Marquez were to fight Pacquiao again he might have to KO him again in order to avoid getting another controversial loss, and who needs pressure like that. Marquez is better off facing a less popular fighter like Bradley or Rios, so that he wouldn’t have to worry so much about needing a KO in order to get a victory in that fight.
This news isn’t going to sit so well with Arum I imagine because he’s been hoping to match Pacquiao back up with Marquez because it would likely be the biggest money fight of Pacquiao’s career if the fight were to be made.
Without Marquez, Arum’s options of finding big money opponents for Pacquiao are very slim. Rios has never even headlined a PPV fight, and he could about as bad as Bradley is in attracting PPV buyers.
We’ve already see that Bradley can’t draw when he fought Pacquiao last year in June, and there fight hauled in less than 1 million buys. Without Marquez, Arum might have to try and arrange a deal with Floyd Mayweather Jr. if he wants to bring big bank for Pacquiao before he retires or gets knocked out again.
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