By Chris Williams: Floyd Mayweather Jr. has already expressed interest in facing the injured Filipino star Manny Pacquiao next year despite the ugliness that transpired after their fight last Saturday night with Pacquiao revealing that he came into the fight with a bad shoulder injury.
Pacquiao’s promoter Bob Arum of Top Rank is also interested in matching the 36-year-old Pacquiao against Mayweather a second time. Arum wants to have that be the first fight for Pacquiao after he comes off his a 9-12 month layoff following his surgery on his right rotator cuff in his shoulder.
Arum, of course, is assuming that the surgery will go well and Pacquiao won’t need additional time to rehab the shoulder.
Mayweather told ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith “I will fight him in a year after his surgery.”
Putting together a second fight with Pacquiao could prove difficult because there will be the headache of trying to negotiate a second time, and things will obviously need to change in terms of the purse split given how poor Pacquiao fought. Regardless of Pacquiao of coming into the fight with an injury, he still looked pretty inept against Mayweather, and I don’t think that changes a year from now. Pacquiao’s fighting style is just too one-dimensional, and he clearly was too small for Mayweather. Pacquiao looked like a guy who should be fighting at 140 or 135 rather than 147.
“I think we now know what the pitfalls were,” Arum said via Dan Rafael of ESPN.com. “And, ultimately, with all the aggravation and trouble, look at the pot of gold that we both produced. I think there will probably be less aggravation in a rematch. We understand each other better now. There’s a real possibility it could work even better.”
It’s unknown what Arum is expecting of a second fight between Mayweather and Pacquiao as far as fan interest goes. It would be wise for them to think seriously about dropping the price tag from $100 to the low $60 region of they don’t want to lose out on a lot of pay-per-view sales for a second fight because I think a lot of fans will have no interest in paying to see the fight a second time for that kind of money.
It was too much of a mismatch the first time around with Mayweather being too good, and the outcome of the fight was muddied with Pacquiao revealing he had a preexisting shoulder injury going into the fight. If you think of it in term of the fight being like someone going to a restaurant and receiving bad surface, you would think that the restaurant owner would go out of their way to give the paying customer a better deal the second time around rather than charge them the same price.
Mayweather did his part last Saturday night, but he was in the ring with an injured fighter who had a terrible game plan and who didn’t look like he wanted to go all out the way he needed to in order to have a chance of winning the fight. For that reason, I think they should sell the second Mayweather-Pacquiao fight for no more than $60. If they sell it for $100 again, I see really low PPV numbers for this one.
Ideally, it would be better if they had Pacquiao come back from the loss and shoulder injury and redeem himself with a couple of solid wins over high quality opposition before facing Mayweather a second time. That’s not going to happen though. Both fighters are too old to put off a rematch, and Pacquiao might get beaten again if he fights someone outside of Arum’s Top Rank stable. Put Pacquiao in with someone like Amir Khan or Keith Thurman, and I see Pacquiao getting beaten even worse than he did by Mayweather. Pacquiao just isn’t a real welterweight, and he’s looked good only because of the guys he’s been put in with rather than him being a legit 147lb fighter in my view.
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