By Chris Williams: Top Rank promoter Bob Arum plans on taking WBO welterweight champion Manny Pacquiao (56-5-2, 38 KOs) to Macau, China once per year for him to fight. Arum sees it as a great place for the 35-year-old Pacquiao to fight, even though his previous fight over there against Brandon Rios brought in just 450,000 pay-per-view buys on HBO.
Arum still thinks it’s a great place for Pacquiao to fight despite the likely lower PPV numbers his fights will generate each time he fights there.
It’s no secret that Arum is trying to open up the Chinese market for pay-per-view. By having Pacquiao and two-time Olympic Chinese gold medalist Zou Shiming on the same card, Arum has a chance of bringing in a lot of PPV buys for his fights in Macau.
“HBO I am sure they never said they would never go back to China, and besides, who are they to say anything when it is my money,” Arum said. “It’s Manny’s career and we are fighting in probably the best location in the world which is in Macau in the Cotai Arena, which is a tremendous place to watch a fight live.”
The negative about Arum staging Pacquiao’s fights in Macao is that many members of the boxing media can’t make the trick due to the cost and the hassle of traveling over 7,000 miles. To travel that far is time consuming and in some cases it’s not worth it to some if all Pacquiao is going to be fighting in Brandon Rios, Chris Algieri and Tim Bradley type opposition.
Arum would likely love to match Pacquiao against the likes of Danny Garcia, Saul “Canelo” Alvarez and Floyd Mayweather Jr. But since that’s not happening, it’s not really motivating for some boxing writers to pay a ton of money to travel all the way to Macao to see Pacquiao fighting Algieri.
If Pacquiao loses this fight then it is probable there will be an immediate rematch between them. If Arum sticks that fight in Macau too, it’s going to be another hardship for a lot of the boxing writers.
“They said to me they wanted Manny to fight there once a year,” Arum said. “So obviously if Manny fights twice a year, he fights there in the fall and in the spring, he fights either in the United States or some other place.”
The Pacquiao-Algieri undercard has the following fights:
Vasyl Lomachenko vs. Chonlatarn Piriyapinyo
Jessie Vargas vs. Antonio DeMarco
Zou Shiming vs. Kwanpichit OnesongchaiGym
Kuok Kun Ng vs. Steve Attard
The Lomachenko-Piriyapinyo is a mismatch between perhaps the best fighter in the featherweight division in Lomachenko against a guys with a badly inflated resume in Piriyapinyo. It’s not a great fight unless you like mismatches.
Vargas-DeMarco fight would have been a good fight if the fight took place before DeMarco was beaten up and knocked out by Adrien Broner.
As far as Shiming vs. OnesongchaiGym, it’s not a great fight because Shiming isn’t facing a good opponent. When he does eventually step it up, which needs to happen soon due to his advanced age, he’s going to be in big trouble if they match him against WBA/WBO flyweight champion Juan Francisco Estrada.
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