By Chris Williams: Manny Pacquiao’s promoter Bob Arum is hopeful that the Pacquiao – Floyd Mayweather Jr negotiations can be completed by this week. The negotiations sped up this week after the two fighters met each other at the Miami Heat – Milwaukee Buck game last Tuesday night. They later met at Pacquiao’s hotel room in Miami on the same night, and went over the stall points in the negotiations.
Arum says that the Showtime-HBO negotiations “were solved two weeks ago,” according to Philboxing.com. This is news for a lot of boxing fans because it was thought that HBO and Showtime are still hashing out an agreement.
With Arum talking positive about the Mayweather-Pacquiao negotiations, you have to worry that something could mess things up. Hopefully the negotiations don’t take a turn for the worse because Pacquiao’s January 31st deadline is only two days away, and if he decides to stick to his word and walk away from the negotiations.
“There are no issues that I can see that mean anything,” Arum said to Philboxing.com. “I think everything is positive and hopefully if everything keeps going well we’ll get it wrapped up by the end of the week…you never know. According to everybody it seems we are moving towards a fight.”
Arum has taken a back seat role in the negotiations, and you have to wonder whether that was done on purpose in order to make it easier for Mayweather to sign. Obviously, Arum hasn’t been quiet during the process, because he’s taken shots at Mayweather on more than one occasion. But Arum hasn’t said anything that angered Mayweather enough to walk away from the negotiations, and that’s a good thing. It shows you that Mayweather wants the fight enough to put up with Arum’s occasional barbs.
Mayweather is set to take the lion’s share of the loot on May 2nd with Mayweather to get a possible $120 million payday for 12 rounds of action. Pacquiao could get $80 million, which will go a long ways towards helping the 36-year-old fighter’s finances. If there’s a rematch, Pacquiao and Mayweather could really make out nicely depending on the interest in the fight.
If their fight on May 2nd is too one-sided, it’ll spoil the broth for a second fight. They might go ahead anyway and face each other a second time due to the money being too good to resist, but it’ll depend largely on how close their initial fight is. If Mayweather ends up clowning Pacquiao for 12 rounds, then it’s going to be difficult to make a case that a rematch is needed.
Pacquiao and his trainer Freddie Roach would have to come up with some kind of excuse about Pacquiao not being 100 percent ready, or him having leg cramps for the boxing public to want to plunk down their money a second time to watch it again.
What we don’t want is to hear a lot of excuses after the fight about Mayweather getting lucky. We saw that with Juan Manuel Marquez being discredited by a lot of boxing fans for him knocking Pacquiao out cold in their fight in 2012, and I think that was totally unfair to Marquez.
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