By Chris Williams: Manny Pacquiao has already agreed to the contract terms for his rematch against WBO welterweight champion Timothy Bradley on April 12th, and now the only thing that needs to get done is getting Bradley to accept the terms to his contract, says Top Rank promoter Bob Arum.
Getting Pacquiao to agree to the terms was obviously the easier part because that’s the main focus for the fight. Bradley is the B-side and will be taking the smaller money, although getting him to agree to the contract hasn’t been easy due to him wanting a pay raise over the last time they fought in 2012.
“We finished with Manny, and we’re finishing up with Bradley,” Arum said via RingTV. So assuming we finish with Bradley, once we’ve got everything in place, then we’ll make the announcement.”
This will get interesting if Bradley decides to not agree to the contract that Arum waives under his nose and decides to try and force the issue to get the money that he wants for the fight. Bradley seems to have all the power in these negotiations because Pacquiao and Arum don’t have any other options due to lack of names that Arum has in his Top Rank stable.
If they don’t give Bradley pretty much everything he asks for in the negotiations then they could be stuck putting Pacquiao in with Ruslan Provodnikov and watching the fight bring in very few buys on PPV. It’s not that it wouldn’t be a good fight between Pacquiao and Provodnikov, because it would be a much better fight than the Pacquiao-Bradley fight. The problem is that Provodnikov is even less well known in the U.S than Bradley is, so fans would ignore Pacquiao’s fight with Provodnikov and decide to say their money rather than watch him fight another obscure opponent they’ve never heard of.
If Arum wants to be able to get guys like Bradley to cave quickly in the future negotiations, if Arum decides to keep matching him against Pacquiao, then he needs to bring some quality fighters to his Top Rank stable in the 140-147 lb. class. If Arum’s only other option for Pacquiao is fights against Provodnikov, Mike Alvarado and Brandon Rios, then guys like Bradley can ask for big money to fight Pacquiao knowing that Arum doesn’t have any other options to put in there with the aging Filipino fighter.
Arum thinks that the interest for the Pacquiao-Bradley II fight will be even more than it was the last time they fought in 2012. I think Arum has a tin ear to what boxing fans think about this fight, because very few of them want to see Pacquiao fight Bradley again.
Arum needs to put his ear to the ground to discover what fans really think about the idea of paying to see another Pacquiao vs. Bradley fight. I think the fight would do well if Arum discounted it to the $5-10 range. You know what I mean? When you buy food that is about to expire in a super market, you usually get it at a reduced price because it’s about to go bad. I see the same thing with the Pacquiao-Bradley rematch. It was a stinker the first time around, and now it’s far worse given that Pacquiao’s two defeats in his last 3 fights. Bradley has a controversial decision over Provodnikov from last year that he still needs to clear up. Beating Juan Manuel Marquez didn’t change anyone’s opinion about Bradley having been badly exposed by Provodnikov.
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