Pacquiao’s next fight in U.S, says Arum

By Boxing News - 09/20/2015 - Comments

Manny PacquiaoBy Tim Fletcher: If Manny Pacquiao’s surgery repaired shoulder is fully healed and 100% by the first quarter of 2016, he’ll be fighting in the United States against an opponent still to be determined, says Pacquiao’s 83-year-old promoter Bob Arum of Top Rank.

Arum says that he had thought about staging Pacquiao’s fight in the Mideast, but he changed his mind about doing that because he believed that the pay-per-view buys on HBO would be cut in half by staging it there, so he’s decided against doing that.

If the gate was going to be a guaranteed large gate, then Arum would have went ahead and scheduled the fight in the Mideast. The opponent that Arum is looking to match against Pacquiao is 28-year-old Amir Khan, who has a large fan base in the East. It’s unclear whether Arum’s desire to make the Pacquiao vs. Khan fight will disappear now that he’s decided against staging the fight in the Mideast.

“I’m not going to make a fight for him until he sees (Dr. Neal) ElAttrache. ElAttrache said he won’t clear him until there’s an MRI,” Arum said to the Las Vegas Review Journal. “We’re looking at the first 3½ months of the year. We’ll look to do it in the States. But you have to be careful with the date,” Arum said.

Besides Khan, Arum is considering Lucas Matthysse, Kell Brook and Terence Crawford as potential opponents. Khan being with Al Haymon supposedly won’t get in the way of Arum making a fight between the two fighters, but we’ll see. If Khan doesn’t wind up getting the fight against Pacquiao then you can speculate that Arum chose not to take the fight due to him being with Haymon.

Khan likely will bring in more pay-per-view buys for Pacquiao than the likes of Brook, Crawford or Matthysse. Khan is able to market fights with his ability to give a lot of interviews with the media, and make interesting sound bites. He’s very blunt about his thoughts, and that makes it more interesting.

If Arum chooses Matthysse, Brook or Crawford, he’ll likely end up with fewer pay-per-view buys than a Pacquiao vs. Khan fight. It wouldn’t be in Pacquiao’s best interest for him to fight any of those other fighters if Khan is available. At this point in Pacquiao’s career he may not need to fight the guy that brings in a lot of money. He could be fine with taking less money given the huge payday he received in his last fight against Floyd Mayweather Jr. on May 2nd of this year. Pacquiao made over $100 million for that fight.

Pacquiao was beaten by a 12 round unanimous decision in a close fight. Pacquiao suffered a torn right rotator cuff in that fight. We can’t know what would have happened if Pacquiao was 100 percent healthy for that fight. You can assume that he would have fought a better fight, but we’ll never know for sure. There’s little chance of a rematch between Pacquiao and Mayweather now that Mayweather has retired from the sport.

Unless he comes back next year to fight Pacquiao again, we’ll have to be satisfied with the one fight they had against each other.

“It’s obvious Mayweather isn’t in the picture,” Arum said. “I have no idea if Floyd’s done. I don’t know that Floyd knows if he’s done.”



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