By Chris Williams: The fight negotiations between WBA/WBC welterweight champion Floyd Mayweather Jr (47-0, 26 KOs) and WBO champ Manny Pacquiao (57-5-2, 38 KOs) are going well, says Lance Pugmire of the Los Angeles Times [latimes.com].
A boxing authority who is apparently privy to the negotiations believes that the negotiations will need another week or possibly a week and a half before the fight is ironed out. The location of the fight and the blood testing is already agreed on. The fight will take place at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada.
The only things that are unknown at this time is the date and the purse split. According to Pugmire, a 60-40 deal is what they’re talking about for the fight, and that Pacquiao is on board with this cut.
The Pacquiao-Mayweather fight will be televised on both HBO and Showtime, although the two cable networks would still have to work out a deal for the fight to be televised on both networks.
The date of the fight could fall on May or June of this year. Mayweather will have to move off his normal Cinco de Mayo fight date in May if they decide on fighting in June, but it’s such a big fight that it really doesn’t need to be staged on a Mexican holiday for it to be successful. Mayweather-Pacquiao is a fight that would be huge no matter which date it was televised on.
Having it on Cinco de Mayo and or the Mexican Independence day holiday in September might help bump up the numbers a little, but probably not by enough to make a real difference.
Having the fight in June helps the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight because it gives more time to market the fight to the boxing public. If the fight goes ahead in May, it leaves just three months to market the fight before it would take place on May 2nd.
If Mayweather agrees to a 60-40 purse split for the Pacquiao fight, he’ll be giving Pacquiao a huge gift because that’s a purse split that is a little too kind to Pacquiao, given his declining pay-per-view numbers and his losses to Tim Bradley and Juan Manuel Marquez.
You would think that a 70-30 or perhaps a 65-35 would be the better purse split for the fight, because it’s a situation where Mayweather is the clear A-side and Pacquiao the B-side. If Marquez only got a 76-24 purse split with Pacquiao, then it makes sense for Mayweather to get a 70-30 purse split with the 36-year-old Pacquiao.
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