By Chris Williams: With Manny Pacquiao a virtual lock to win a senate seat in the election this month in the Philippines, it’s unlikely that he’ll be able to resume his boxing career to continue fighting, according to his 84-year-old promoter Bob Arum.
This means that we won’t be seeing a rematch between Pacquiao and Mayweather. The senate position that Pacquiao is about to win is a 6-year commitment. That means Pacquiao is stuck in that job for the next six years of his life and it’s a time-consuming position.
Pacquiao can’t take a couple months off to fight Mayweather or Saul “Canelo” Alvarez to make a lot of money while his fellow senators continue to labor at their jobs in the senate.
94 percent of the voted have been counted in the national elections in the Philippines, and Pacquiao is firmly in seventh place. The top twelve candidates get voted into the senate, which means Pacquiao is in great position to win the senate seat that he wants.
“I texted him congratulating him,” said Arum to ESPN.com. “I don’t think so [Pacquiao will return]. My mindset is that it’s over. When it’s over, it’s over. People say fighters always change their minds, but this is a different situation.”
It really doesn’t matter that Pacquiao isn’t going to be coming back because he’s pretty much burned his bridges with a lot of boxing fans with his fight against Floyd Mayweather Jr. last year, and his subsequent poorly thought out decision to face Tim Bradley for a third time instead of someone that he’d never fought before like Terence Crawford, Keith Thurman, Shawn Porter, Danny Garcia, Amir Khan or Saul “Canelo” Alvarez.
Even if Pacquiao did return to the ring to resume his career, he probably would get stuck fighting one of Arum’s Top Rank stable fighters.
Mayweather has shown no interest in wanting to make a comeback. He’s retired, rich and very happy. If Mayweather does choose to resume his pro career, he likely won’t be thinking of a second fight against Pacquiao. Mayweather was left with a bad taste in his mouth from the Pacquiao fight last year after Pacquiao said he was injured for the fight. Pacquiao also said he felt he won the fight.
Mayweather just saw him as a poor loser and he decided he didn’t want to fight him a second time after that. If Mayweather does come back, he’s probably not going to consider a second fight against Pacquiao because there would be no interest for a second fight. If anything, a second fight between them would anger the boxing public because they would see it as a rip off with PPV and ticket prices being raised through the roof again like it was last time they fought.
That was a bad idea for them to raise the prices on the fight instead of keeping it at the rates for normal fights. You can argue that they should have dropped the prices due to the huge amount of fans showing interest in wanting to see it. They were going to make their money and there was no need to greedily raise the prices the way they did.