Arum: Marquez wants Pacquiao-Bradley winner

By Boxing News - 02/02/2014 - Comments

marquez5By Chris Williams: It seems that Top Rank promoter Bob Arum won’t have to worry about trying to scratch up an opponent for Manny Pacquiao to fight next September, because Juan Manuel Marquez (55-7-1, 40 KO’s) has told Arum that he wants to fight the winner of the April 12th fight between Pacquiao and WBO welterweight champion Tim Bradley.

Marquez wants a chance to capture a 5th division world title, and the WBO 147 lb. belt is what he’s after. Marquez would prefer to fight Bradley for the WBO title so that he can avenge what he feels was a controversial 12 round split decisionloss from last October, but the chance of Bradley beating Pacquiao for a second time aren’t too certain right now.

Bradley, like usual, is full of self confidence and is talking himself up as if he’ll easily beat Pacquiao, but it’s not looking good for him. A properly motivated Pacquiao will be a lot for Bradley to handle on April 12th, and it’s going to be difficult for Bradley to win another close decision like he did when he beat Pacquiao in June of 2012 by a 12 round split decision.

“Marquez really wants only one thing before he retires,” Arum said to Hustleboss. “He wants to win that [WBO welterweight] title. And he has indicated to us that he would be very available to fight the winner of the Pacquiao and Bradley in the fall…He’s [Marquez] obviously changed his tune [about not wanting to fight Pacquiao again].”

I bet Arum is very happy about Marquez changing his mind about the possibility of fighting Pacquiao for a 5th time, because he’s really the only guy that Arum has in his Top Rank stable that can help Pacquiao bring in over 1 million buys at this point in his career. The good old days where Arum could just throw anyone in the ring with Pacquiao and wind up with over 1 million PPV buys appear to be over with. Now it takes a quality opponent like Marquez with a huge fan base to pump up Pacquiao’s numbers over the 1 million PPV buys mark. I guess fans got tired of paying to see mismatches like Pacquiao’s fights against Antonio Margarito, Joshua Clottey, and Brandon Rios.

What this means is that instead of throwing the skinny super featherweight Mikey Garcia into the ring with Pacquiao next September, Arum can match Marquez against Pacquiao, and end up with a fight card that will be pretty much a guaranteed 1 million buy card. It doesn’t matter if the undercard fights on the card are as poor as they were for Pacquiao’s fight against Rios, fans will still gladly purchase the Pacquiao-Marquez 5 fight on PPV.



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