Arum thinks Pacquiao-Mayweather fight is still possible

By Boxing News - 11/04/2013 - Comments

arum436By Chris Williams: Top Rank promoter Bob Arum still believes that a mega fight between Manny Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather Jr. for the second part of 2014 provided that Pacquiao beats Brandon Rios and whoever Arum matches Pacquiao against in early 2014. There’s a lot of ifs involved on Pacquiao’s side before you can even get to whether Mayweather would be interested in such a match-up. Mayweather Jr. said recently that there wouldn’t be any point in fighting Pacquiao now because he’s lost his last two fights.

Arum told 1116 SEN Radio this via the Manila Standard “The only major impediment is that Mayweather now fights for Showtime and Manny for HBO. When they had the same situation years ago, where Lennox Lewis was an HBO fighter and Mike Tyson fought for Showtime. [They] came together and shared responsibilities of promoting the pay-per-view and it worked out really well. If Manny demonstrates that he’s back and there’s a public outcry, we should be able to get it done.”

Boxing fans obviously would like to see a Mayweather-Pacquiao fight still. But for that fight to happen, Pacquiao would have to stop losing over and over, and find some way to agree to whatever demands that Mayweather Jr. has for him to make the fight happen. Mayweather wanted random blood tests in order to fight Pacquiao in 2010, but they were unable to agree to the testing that Mayweather wanted, so the fight didn’t happen.

Now things are a little more complicated because not only does Mayweather want random blood testing, he’ll likely want a bigger split of the purse. Pacquiao and Arum had Mayweather agreeing to a 50-50 purse split. That’s not going to happen now, because Mayweather will no doubt want the lion’s share of the cash for the fight to happen.

If you look back at one of the hugest mistakes that Arum and Pacquiao made during their time together, it’s the fact that they didn’t take the Mayweather fight in 2010 when they had him agreeing to a 50-50 deal. I suppose they might have figured that they could pick up negotiations later on in the future because there’s no other way of understanding why they moved away from the negotiations. Pacquiao ended up fighting former Top Rank stable fighter Joshua Clottey in a fight that made only a tiny amount of what Pacquiao could have made had he agreed to fight Mayeather in 2010.

It’s very likely that Pacquiao will lose one or both of his next fights and that in turn will permanently close the door for any possible Pacquiao-Mayweather fight.



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