By Robert “Big Moe” Elmore: During the Manny Pacquiao/Chris Algieri press tour, Freddie Roach, Bob Arum and Manny Pacquiao all mentioned Floyd Mayweather on a constant basis. Yes, I know they were probably asked by reporters about Floyd and they gave their opinions. In fact, there was so much Mayweather talk that there was very little talk of Algieri from Arum, Roach, or Pac.
They could have said “We’re not here to talk about Floyd. I’m here to promote my fight with Algieri”. But they didn’t. Arum stated that people were disgusted with Floyd’s pay per view bouts. They rambled on and on until rumors surfaced that Mayweather’s rematch with Marcos Maidana did 925,000 buys. These numbers are not official, but they are considerably good considering the undercard had no superstars on it. The gate raked in over 15 million dollars unseating Oscar De La Hoya and Pacquiao’s event that took place in 2008. After the numbers were released, Arum went on record saying that there were no more problems in getting the fight done (random drug testing purse split etc). He said HBO and Showtime are on the same page as far as distributing the fight. Top Rank even had no problem with Floyd being the A side.
But it seemed to me that they were hoping the Mayweather/Maidana fight would tank so they could get the upper hand in negotiations. Pac’s fight with Algieiri is good matchup, but I don’t believe the fight will do well on pay per view. Algieri is not known to the casual fan although he is coming off the biggest win of his career against Ruslan Provodnikov. If the Floyd’s fight would have tanked then Top Ranks leverage would have been “Floyd’s numbers are down and the only way to bring them up is to fight Pacquaio. We deserve a 50/50 split”. The only way for Manny to make a case that he deserves a 50/50 split is for his fight with Algieri to do equal to or greater than the Mayweather/Maidana event. Nobody cares about how many titles a fighter has won or how many divisions they’ve climbed when negotiating a fight. It’s all about numbers. It’s about what “what have you done lately”. And lately Floyd has been outperforming Pac in purses and pay per view numbers.
But if fans want to put their pay days and pay per view bouts side by side, Floyd wins hands down. I believe the Floyd/Pac fight will happen for one reason. Floyd is now a fully legitimate promotional company. Before, he was paying Golden Boy a flat fee to use their promoter’s license. So had the Pac fight took place in the past that would have been money split three ways. That’s bad for business. Had Pac decided to let his current contract expire at the end of this year, he could have dealt with Mayweather one on one. This would have eliminated Top Rank’s take and the funds would go straight to Manny. He has MP Promotions so it wouldn’t have been a problem doing the fight. On top of this, Pac has to beat Algeiri.
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