By Chris Williams: After a slow week of negotiations, Top Rank promoter Bob Arum isn’t too pleased with the lack of speed in the Floyd Mayweather Jr vs. Manny Pacquiao negotiations. Arum would like to see their negotiations speed up if possible, but that’s not going to be possible because Mayweather’s management are making sure that everything in the contract is to their liking.
Arum, who promotes the 36-year-old Pacquiao, wants things to go quickly in order for the negotiations to get completed in time for the two mega-stars to battle it out on May 2nd in a joint pay-per-view telecast on HBO and Showtime.
“There are issues that should be solved in 10 minutes, but it’s a slow dance,” Arum said via the Washingtonpost.com. “We send one draft to their side and their lawyer sends back a draft with something else that’s an issue. And there doesn’t seem to be any urgency about it on their side. It’s terrible.”
Arum just needs to relax and make sure that he’s giving Mayweather what he wants for this fight to happen. They’ve already agreed to the purse split a long time ago, so it’s not as if Mayweather is asking for more cash for the fight. He just wants to make sure that the specifics are completed. There’s nothing wrong with that. Mayweather is a professional and everything has to be in order for him to sign on the dotted line.
Mayweather isn’t going to find himself blindly signing any old contract that may have fine print that could mess him up for this fight. Mayweather’s adviser, the Harvard educated Al Haymon, is a wizard at reading the fine print in contracts and he’s not going to let Mayweather get shafted.
“The question is whether the Mayweather side will listen to him [CBS/Showtime president Les Moonves]. If they’re sincere about trying to make the fight it shouldn’t be an issue, or are they playing a game? I don’t know. I go back and forth. I thought they were always playing a game, that Floyd didn’t want the fight.”
Arum needs to realize that Mayweather is too mature and too much of an adult to waste time playing games. He stands to make as much as $200 million for the Pacquiao fight, so why would he play games with Arum about this fight?
Mayweather is a 3:1 favorite to win, and some boxing fans think he should be as high as an 8:1 favorite. That’s money in the bank for Mayweather, and I don’t see him wanting to walk away from the fight to limit himself to a small payday of $40 million to fight a cat like Amir Khan or Danny Garcia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c43HRS89cZU
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