By Chris Williams: In bad news for the Manny Pacquiao vs. Tim Bradley fight card for April 9th, promotional company Sauerland Events has won Wednesday’s purse bid in beating Top Rank’s bid to stage the title fight between WBO super middleweight champion Arthur Abraham (44-4, 29 KOs) and the Top Rank fighter Gilberto Ramirez (33-0, 24 KOs). Sauerland won the purse bid with a winning bid of $1, 563, 057 compared to Top Rank’s $1.5 million.
The Abraham-Ramirez fight could still wind up on the Pacquiao vs. Bradley 3 card, but it might be difficult to make that happen unless there’s enough money to go around for Abraham. If not, then the Abraham-Ramirez fight will be staged in Berlin, Germany on 4/9.
It’s important that Top Rank promoter Bob Arum get the Abraham vs. Ramirez fight for the Pacquiao-Bradley card, because they need a strong undercard to help interest the boxing fans to purchase the card on HBO PPV.
Top Rank reportedly is interested in loading the undercard with a lot of Mexican talent, and having Ramirez on the undercard would be a big plus for them. Ramirez isn’t a star yet along the lines of Canelo Alvarez, but Arum is hoping to make him into a big star.
At 24, Ramirez has the youth still to become a big name, but he needs to win a world title and needs to keep improving. Ramirez didn’t look so great in his fight against Russian Maxim Vlasov last year in January. Ramirez won the fight by a narrow 10 round unanimous decision, but he did not impress in that fight. In Ramirez’s last two performances against Derek Edwards and Gevorg Khatchikian, he’s shown a great deal of improvement. Ramirez still looks flawed, but he’s clearly better than he was in the Vlasov fight.
Getting boxing fans to purchase the Pacquiao vs. Bradley 3 fight on HBO PPV may prove to be a very difficult task for Arum. It’s going to take a lot more than adding little known prospect Gilberto Ramirez to the card if Arum wants to get people to purchase the fight card in high numbers on HBO. Arum has said it himself in the past that boxing fans don’t purchase cards on PPV in order to see the undercard fights.
It’s thought that Arum has used this excuse as justification in the past for having skeletal undercards with very few big names for some of Pacquiao’s recent fights. But for Pacquiao’s third fight against Bradley, it’s going to take some big moves from the 84-year-old Arum if he wants to get the fans to purchase the card on PPV, because the Pacquiao-Bradley fight is a like played out oil well that is now completely dry of black gold to pump from it. There is no mystery at all in the outcome of the fight, and Arum might as well have dragged Brandon Rios out from retirement and stuck him in with Pacquiao for a rematch. Fans don’t want to see Pacquiao beat Bradley again.
There had been recent talk of 44-year-old heavyweight Ike Ibeabuchi fighting Andy Ruiz on the Pacquiao-Bradley undercard. However, it doesn’t look like that fight is going to take place because the fight is no longer being talked about for the card.
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