By Chris Williams: Top Rank promoter Bob Arum has made it known that his number one priority for the next fight for Manny Pacquiao (57-5-w, 38 KOs) is to match him up against WBA/WBC 147 pound champion Floyd Mayweather Jr (47-0, 26 KOs). But since that fight will likely not be happening anytime soon if ever, Arum is going to need to match Pacquiao against someone.
One of the possibilities for Pacquiao to face in 2015 is Arum’s fighter WBA champion Jessie Vargas (26-0, 9 KOs). Arum is reportedly interested in matching Pacquiao up against the 25-year-old Vargas, even though Vargas arguably has about as many fans as Pacquiao’s last opponent Chris Algieri. This should be a fight even easier than the Algieri fight for the aging Pacquiao.
In other words, Arum would be lucky if a Pacquiao-Vargas fight brought in 400,000 buys at best. Vargas simply doesn’t have the fan base to bring anything to the table for a Pacquiao-Vargas fight.
Vargas is coming off of a less than impressive 12 round decision win over Antonio DeMarco from November 22nd in Macau, China. Vargas had to struggle to defeat a fighter that Adrien Broner totally destroyed in their fight in 2012. That obviously didn’t make Vargas look good.
Vargas’ lack of punching power is a problem, because he simply doesn’t have the power to beat anyone with ease. He’s forced to fight hard to go 12 grueling rounds each time he fights. In his bout before the DeMarco fight, Vargas defeated Anton Novikov by a controversial 12 round unanimous decision last August in a fight where many boxing fans felt that Vargas should have lost.
Arum is pretty much scraping the bottom of his Top Rank barrel in matching Pacquiao against the likes of Vargas. It just kind of shows you how limited the prospects are for Pacquiao. He re-signed with Top Rank recently, but unfortunately there’s just not a lot of guys for him to fight. Once you get past Tim Bradley and Brandon Rios, it’s pretty slim pickings.
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