Arum: Bradley’s best chance to win is if Pacquiao fights a stupid fight

By Boxing News - 04/10/2014 - Comments

bradley69-By Chris Williams: Top Rank promoter Bob Arum thinks that WBO welterweight champion Tim Bradley (31-0, 12 KO’s) has been purposely trying to ramp Manny Pacquiao (55-5-2, 38 KO’s) into a wild fighting frenzy to where he’ll come on like a mad dog on Saturday night and will run up on one of Bradley’s right hand shots that will do the work for Bradley by generating most of the power.

Arum doesn’t think Pacquiao is falling for it, as he expects him to fight under control when his two Top Rank fighters meet each other at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada.

“Look, Bradley’s best chance to win the fight is to have Manny fight a stupid fight – like Manny ended up fighting with Juan Manuel Marquez – he walks in to punches,” Arum said to the Telegraph.

I don’t agree with Arum about Pacquiao fighting a stupid fight against Marquez. He fought like he normally does. The problem is he couldn’t take Marquez’s power in that fight, so he ended up getting knocked down twice and knocked cold. But it wasn’t because Pacquiao fought a stupid fight that Marquez won.

That’s not giving credit to Marquez, is it? Did all of Pacquiao’s past opponents fight stupid fights when he knocked them out or was that a case of Pacquiao fighting better than them? Marquez was simply the better fighter than Pacquiao two years ago, as he was in their three previous fights in getting arguably robbed three times.

Bradley can win with Pacquiao fighting the smartest fight that he’s capable of doing. I don’t understand Arum saying that Bradley’s best chance of winning is if Pacquiao fights stupid. That’s not giving Bradley much credit for being a talented fighter. Bradley proved in their previous fight that he could beat Pacquiao with the Filipino star fighting a smart fight. He fought as best as he could, but Bradley was simply the better fighter and that’s why he got the win.

Arum thinks that the Pacquiao-Bradley 2 fight will bring in between 1 million to 1.2 million pay-per-view buys. I find that really hard to believe, but if it makes Arum feel good thinking about it, then so be it.

“The first fight between them we did about 900,000 ‘buys’ but we ran in to bad luck because the night of the fight the basketball series – the Eastern Conference finals – went to a seventh game with the Celtics playing the Miami Heat and that took everybody’s attention… I think we’re going to go over a million – I’d say perhaps 1.2 million.”

I believe Arum is dreaming to the extreme. I see Arum’s vision thing going belly up on Saturday night with the Pacquiao-Bradley 2 fight bring in just a little over 500,000 PPV buys. You can thank Arum for those numbers, because if he had included a good undercard with the Pacquiao-Bradley fight, he’d maybe get those 900,000 buys that he had the first time around. But I personally wouldn’t pay a dime to see the Pacquiao vs. Bradley 2 fight due to the high price and the absence of what I consider a high quality undercard. I don’t consider these fights as being good undercard fights, not even on ESPN: Raymundo Beltran vs. Arash Usmanee, Bryan Vasquez vs. Jose Felix Jr and Khabib Allakhverdiev vs. Jessie Vargas.



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