By Dan Ambrose: With time running out before the May 2nd mega-fight between Manny Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather Jr, Top Rank promoter Bob Arum is starting to think that the fight should be moved off the 5/2 date and instead staged on May 30th or in June.
Arum wants to make sure that the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight has enough time for it to be properly promoted, and if the contracts for the fight don’t get signed for another two more weeks at the earliest, then that’ll take the negotiations until mid-February.
That leaves less than three full months to promote the fight, and Arum obviously would like to have more time than that.
Getting Mayweather to agree to moving the fight off of the May 2nd fight date, which falls on the Mexican holiday Cinco de Mayo, may prove to be difficult, because he’s probably not going to want to give up that date to the 24-year-old red-headed Saul “Canelo” Alvarez, who is tentatively planning on fighting the rusty slugger James Kirkland on that date rather than a more relevant contender.
Mayweather will want to stay on the May 2nd date, because that’s when a lot of Mexican fans will be celebrating the Cinco de Mayo holiday, and many of them will be looking to watch some good boxing matches like Mayweather-Pacquiao.
“The thing that really concerns me is that we are running out of time for May 2,” Arum said via Dan Rafael of ESPN.com. “If you want to drag this out a little longer then move the fight to later in May — May 30 is a good date — or go in June. We agreed to go on May 2 because that is the date Mayweather is hung up on, but if we’re going to go on May 2 we need to get this done.”
The Mayweather-Pacquiao fight is a big enough one to where it probably won’t need a full three months of marketing by Top Rank, HBO, Showtime and Mayweather Promotions for it to be a huge success. If they can’t get the word out about the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight taking place in two months of marketing, then it probably won’t matter whether they had a third month or not.
The only negative about the Mayweather vs. Pacquiao fight taking place on May 2nd is that they would need to get the promotional tour out of the way as soon as possible in order for the two superstars to have time to train for the fight.
If Mayweather wants to go on a huge 11 to 15 city promotional tour to promote the fight, then he and Pacquiao are going to need to start that tour by at least mid-February in order to have it done by the beginning of March.
Taking up one week on a huge promotional tour of 11 or more cities is going to be a grueling thing. I think it would be best if they stretched the tour out for two full weeks for them to cover all the cities.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ow4mr6X7hxc
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