Arum wants Mayweather next for Pacquiao on April 12th in Las Vegas

By Boxing News - 11/24/2013 - Comments

pac#4By Chris Williams: If Bob Arum of Top Rank gets his way, Manny Pacquiao (55-5-2, 38 KO’s) will be facing Floyd Mayweather Jr. (47-0, 26 KO’s) next on April 12th in Las Vegas, Nevada. That’s the fight that Arum wants for Pacquiao following Pacquiao’s 12 round unanimous decision win over Arum’s fighter Brandon Rios (31-2-1, 23 KO’s) last night at the Cotai Arena, Venetian Resort, Macao, Macao S.A.R., China. Pacquiao beat Rios decisively by the scores 119-109, 120-108 and 118-110.

Arum said this via Steve Kim “If all sides can cut out the crap it can get done. Where there’s a will there’s a way.”

It was expected that Arum would start talking Pacquiao-Mayweather fight after this tune-up against Rios, but this is definitely not going to be enough for Pacquiao to get that fight because it didn’t prove anything at all other than Pacquiao can beat a fighter that was easily beaten by Mike Alvarado last March. Pacquiao got sloppy seconds with Rios. If Arum wants to get the Mayweather fight for Pacquiao, then he’s going to need to beat some quality fighters or at least the last two guys that beat him in the 40-year-old past his best Juan Manuel Marquez and Tim Bradley. I doubt that would be enough either to get the Mayweather fight, because that would bring Pacquiao only back to where he was before he was beaten by those two. He would still need to beat a good fighter that isn’t washed up or weak punching, and there’s no one really good in Arum’s Top Rank stable that can give Pacquiao an opportunity to accomplish that.

If Pacquiao were to avenge his losses to Marquez and Bradley, that would take a year of his career to do that. He would then need at least three good wins over the likes of Ruslan Provodnikov, Miguel Cotto and Saul “Canelo” Alvarez for him to be in position for a Mayweather fight, but the only one of those guys that Pacquiao could get for a fight is Provodnikov, and beating him won’t be ebough to get the Mayweather fight.

There honestly are too many obstacles in the way for a Pacquiao-Mayweather fight to ever take place, so Arum should forget about that fight altogether and continue to match Pacquiao up against his Top Rank stable fighters until he retires. I imagine Arum can put together another 2-4 fights against Bradley, one more against Marquez and Rios, and maybe a couple of fights against Mike Alvarado and Terence Crawford. Those are all awful fights like the Rios one, but that’s probably the guys that Pacquiao will finish up his career fighting exclusively. I don’t see Pacquiao ever fighting Mayweather. There are too many things that stand in the way of that fight from taking place. Pacquiao would have to accept a lot less money than Mayweather, he would need to accept the blood testing, he would probably need to agree to have the fight staged on Showtime rather than HBO, and the fight would definitely need to take place in the U.S rather than Asia.



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