By Jeff Aranow: Top Rank promoter Bob Arum plans on making one last attempt at putting together a rematch between his fighter Manny Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather Jr. Arum will reportedly be speaking with the 37-year-old Pacquiao soon to see where he’s at with a second fight against Mayweather. Arum wants to give Pacquiao some breathing room right now with him about to be declared a senator in the Philippines.
Pacquiao is in 7th place in the elections and that’s good enough for him to be voted into office for a long six-year term. Besides speaking with Pacquiao, Arum will also be communicating with Mayweather to find out his thoughts on a rematch.
Mayweather has talked about wanting to fight again if he gets a nine-figure payday, but the only way he’s going to get that kind of money is if he fights Pacquiao or Gennady Golovkin. Mayweather can’t make that kind of money fighting Saul “Canelo” Alvarez a second time because the interest in a second fight between them would likely be far below the 2.2 million buys they brought in for their fight in 2012.
“Let him have his moment,” Arum said about Pacquiao to mb.com.ph. “We’ll soon know the real score with Mayweather. I will talk to him after I canvass everything. In the end, it’s Manny’s call.”
It’s definitely Pacquiao’s call whether he wants to fight again or not. I’m not sure that Pacquiao will at this point. With Pacquiao being a senator, he stands to lose a lot if he gets beaten a second time by Mayweather. Pacquiao is expected to help govern his country and it might not look good with him still fighting and losing to Mayweather.
One gets the sense that Pacquiao will continue to be asked to fight until he no longer brings in a lot of money. If it was just him coming back for one more fight against Mayweather, then you could understand Pacquiao making the 84-year-old Arum a happy man by going him a favor this one last time. But it might not end like that. It’s hard to imagine Pacquiao not being asked again and again to keep coming back to fight other guys like Terence Crawford, Jessie Vargas, Saul “Canelo” Alvarez and even Tim Bradley.
A second fight between Pacquiao and Mayweather might not do very well as far as PPV buys go. There are a lot of angry boxing fans from the last time Pacquiao and Mayweather fought each other in 2015. Many of these fans are upset at feeling like they were gauged with the prices for the Pacquiao-Mayweather fight being raised through the roof, and the product being a poor one with Mayweather focusing on not getting hit, and Pacquiao fighting timidly. Pacquiao then revealed afterwards that he had a bad shoulder for the fight.
The undercard for the Pacquiao vs. Mayweather fight looked like it had been thrown together without much of an emphasis made on putting notable fighters in competitive fights. A second fight between Pacquiao and Mayweather might not be the gold mine that some think. It could be a fight that wouldn’t even bring 1 million PPV buys. However, Mayweather is still the best option Pacquiao has unless Arum can get Canelo for Pacquiao. That might be a better fight because Canelo doesn’t have the baggage that Mayweather has for his fights against Pacquiao and Andre Berto following him around.
Canelo has done a good job of coming back from his loss to Mayweather in 2013 by beating guys like Erislandy Lara, Alfredo Angulo, Miguel Cotto, Amir Khan and James Kirkland. Granted, Canelo didn’t look good in his fights against Lara and Cotto, but he still won them. Canelo might need to get the fight against Golovkin out of the way first before the boxing public would be ready to see him fight Pacquiao. If Canelo skips past the Golovkin fight to fight welterweight Pacquiao, it would make Canelo look like he’s ducking the equally big Golovkin in order to fight another welterweight that he would have a huge weight advantage over.
It was a mistake on Arum’s part to have Pacquiao fight Tim Bradley in his final fight last April, because the two fighters had already fought each other twice before and the interest from the fans just wasn’t there. Arum should have tested the idea of a Pacquiao-Bradley fight in focus forum before pulling the trigger on that fight.
The aging Top Rank promoter would have found out that very few fans had any interest in paying to see a third fight between Pacquiao and Bradley. Arum then could have matched Pacquiao up against Canelo instead of Bradley and he would have been a very happy promoter with the money the fight would have brought in. Even Khan would have been a huge upgrade to a third fight against Bradley. Someone in the Top Rank organization should have told Arum what time it is because he clearly made a mistake in giving the green light to a third Pacquiao-Bradley fight.