By Chris Williams: For boxing fans waiting anxiously to hear any news of progress in the Floyd Mayweather Jr – Manny Pacquiao negotiations, there was nothing said as of last Friday. However, there are a lot of positive rumors floating around that the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight could be about to be announced by Mayweather by next week.
Whether that happens or not is unclear. In the meantime, the lack of news on the fight negotiations can be seen as a good thing, because we’ve recently been hearing mainly negative stuff about the negotiations not making any forward progress. But with no one saying anything now, it has to be seen as a positive.
“Silence is golden and no news is good news in the Floyd Mayweather [and] Manny Pacquiao talks, for those who want the fight anyway,” Lance Pugmire of the LA Times said on his Twitter on Friday. “[It] Takes eight weeks of training for these guys to be ready. They’re right on time for those sweating it.”
Yes, Pugmire is right. There’s plenty of time for Mayweather and Pacquiao to train for the fight. Obviously, getting the fight announced next week would help give the two fighters time to market the fight with a tour of the United States, if not a world tour.
If they announce the fight next week, they could still do an 11 city world tour if they started immediately to travel around and the world. They can still hit the major cities in the United States like Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, San Jose, San Antonio, Dallas, San Diego and Las Vegas. As for traveling outside of the U.S, they’d have time to hit a few major countries.
Hopefully, Mayweather doesn’t meet resistance from Pacquiao, his adviser Michael Koncz and promoter Bob Arum when it comes time to discuss the marketing of the fight. If Koncz and Pacquiao decide they want to the marketing of the fight on the cheap by only hitting two cities during the entire tour, then that might be a problem for Mayweather because he likes to do things in a big way and not cheaply.
Mayweather is a businessman and he knows the value that a long tour has when it comes to increasing the pay-per-view sales for his fights. He might not be happy if Pacquiao, Konz and Arum want to just travel to a couple of cities in order to save money.
With the kind of loot that this fight is going to bring in for both fighters, it makes absolutely no sense for them not to market the fight to the hilt. If they can hit as many cities as possible with a huge amount of media members following them, it can only help make the fight a bigger event than it would be if they were to only have a limited promotional tour.
As Dan Rafael of ESPN pointed out last Friday, the media members would tell people they know and they in turn would tell people about the fight. It would have a snowball effect by the time the fight takes place on May 2nd.
Mayweather doesn’t want to move off the May 2nd fight date, so it’s important that the fight negotiations get wrapped up soon in order for there to be enough time for the long promotional tour.
The fighters won’t be able to conduct a tour once they start training for the fight, so it’s important that the remaining days in February be used for the tour. March and April will be training months for the fighters.
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