By Chris Williams: The well-respected LA Times reporter Lance Pugmire if reporting that today’s discussions in the Floyd Mayweather Jr and Manny Pacquiao led to nothing eventful for their proposed May 2nd mega-fight at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada.
“The phrase I was told today about Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao talks was “nothing meaningful,” Pugmire said on his twitter.
This still doesn’t mean that the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight won’t take place. It just means that nothing special occurred today. Thankfully, there’s still plenty of time to go before the fight.
Pacquiao’s own close adviser Michael Koncz has already said it himself that they don’t need a world press tour to promote the fight, and that the fight will basically market itself without the expenditure of money.
What this means is that the negotiations can continue on for a lot longer without the worry of a drop dead deadline would potentially kill it the way that the first Mayweather-Pacquiao negotiations were killed in 2009.
The 24-hour deadline Mayweather was given left that fight DOA despite the fact that there was no real hurry to rush the negotiations. Pacquiao didn’t have a great opponent for him to fight, so they should have stuck it out until the bitter end to get the negotiations completed.
What we saw instead was Pacquiao and Arum pulling out of the negotiations, and then Pacquiao turning around and fighting then Top Rank stable fighter Joshua Clottey in a one-sided fight. The Pacquiao-Clottey fight looked more like a between a sparring partner and a champion. It was about as interesting to watch as Pacquiao’s fight against Brandon Rios in 2013.
With there being no movement in today’s negotiations, it tells both sides that someone is going to need to blink first so that this bout can get made. It’s looking like the two sides are still stuck on the same issues day after day, and that tells me that someone is going to need to give in.
It’s hard to imagine that Pacquiao and Arum are willing to lose this fight by failing to give in on the negotiations, so hopefully that’s not what’s happening here. Pacquiao doesn’t have the A-side power to be sticking firm in the negotiations, and he also doesn’t have any good options for him to fight if the Mayweather negotiations fail to pan out.
It’s pretty obvious that if Pacquiao isn’t able to work out a fight against Mayweather then Arum will stick him in with Top Rank stable fighter Jessie Vargas. That’ll be a terrible fight that will likely bring in similar pay-per-view numbers as Pacquiao’s fights against Chris Algieri and Brandon Rios.
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