Pacquiao-Algieri tour ends this Thursday

By Boxing News - 09/03/2014 - Comments

pac444By Chris Williams: The 27,273 mile 6-city tour will end for WBO welterweight champion Manny Pacquiao (56-5-2, 38 KOs) and Chris Algieri (20-0, 8 KOs) this Thursday at the New York Stock Exchange. The tour has taken them from a starting point in Macao, China to California and now it’s heading to New York.

The sad thing is instead of Pacquiao’s November 22nd fight against Algieri being talked about, boxing fans have mainly ignored that fight and focused on what if type match-up against Floyd Mayweather Jr.

That’s pretty bad for Pacquiao and especially for Algieri, because the whole idea behind the 27,000 mile tour was to try and drum interest in their HBO pay-per-view fight on November 22nd at the Cotai Arena, Venetian Resort, Macao, Macao S.A.R., China.

That fight is almost being dismissed by boxing fans as a forgone conclusion that Pacquiao will be winning it and then looking to fight Mayweather.

With the lack of interest that boxing fans have showed to the Pacquiao-Algieri fight suggests that Bob Arum of Top Rank may have made a huge, huge mistake in selecting Algieri as Pacquiao’s next opponent instead of someone a lot better known than him like Miguel Cotto.

You can understand how difficult it might be for Arum to find a good opponent for Pacquiao, but it’s not impossible if he were willing to move up in weight. But Arum thought that boxing fans would like the idea of Pacquiao fighting an opponent with two college degrees and a possible future in medicine.

I don’t know why Arum would think that, because it’s not angle that is interesting enough to connect the average boxing fan. It’s great that Algieri has a couple of degrees and all, but it means little if boxing fans don’t think he can win the fight.

That’s the bottom line. Arum could have dragged out a fighter with a couple of PHDs from Harvard for Pacquiao’s next opponent, and I seriously doubt that boxing fans would have cared anymore about the fight than they do the Pacquiao-Algieri fight.

It’s not about the background of a fighter that boxing fans care about. Fans just want to know can the guy fight, and will he make it entertaining. Algieri didn’t make it exciting in his last fight against Ruslan Provodnikov, so that tells fans that they’re probably not going to see an exciting fight. So not only do fans have no clue who Algieri is, some also believe it’s going to be a boring fight with Pacquiao chasing the 5’10” Algieri around the ring for 12 rounds the same way that Provodnikov did last June.

“It’s a long, long trip, but I’m enjoying it,” Pacquiao said via Dan Rafael of ESPN. “I enjoy meeting the people. To adjust to those time zones, that is hard. When we arrived I didn’t sleep, so that was very hard.”

Pacquiao has looked cranky and irritable since arriving in the United States for the West Coast part of the tour. He’s not looked and acted like the same Pacquiao. At first I thought it was age, but then looking at him closely, you could see he was not sleeping well.

Arum should have extended the press tour to another 10 cities in order to try and get boxing fans interested in the Pacquiao-Algieri fight. He and Freddie Roach also shouldn’t have brought up Mayweather’s name during their interviews, because all that’s accomplished id crowding out all news of the Pacquiao-Algieri fight to make casual boxing fans think Mayweather and Pacquiao are fighting, when they clearly aren’t. If boxing fans think Pacquiao is going to be fighting Mayweather soon, then why would they want to waste their hard-earned money paying to see Pacquiao fight Algieri?



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