By Chris Williams: Manny Pacquiao’s former strength and conditioning coach Alex Ariza thinks that Pacquiao’s promoter Bob Arum of Top Rank is looking to cash Pacquiao out. Arum is talking about Pacquiao returning to the ring this year after being retired recently. Ariza thinks that Arum just wants to get what he can out of Pacquiao, and that he thinks he discards fighters like animals.
“He’s going to cash Pacquiao out,” said Ariza about promoter Bob Arum to Fighthype.com. “It’s not different from what he did with Erik Morales, with Chavez, with any of them. He’ll try to cash you out and get what you can get out of you. That’s what he does. He treats fighters like animals. It’s like a race dog. Once you’re done racing, throw you in the trash,” said Ariza.
Arum says he wants Pacquiao to fight the winner of the July 23 fight between his fighters Viktor Postol and Terence Crawford. Arum promotes both of those fighters in his Top Rank company. Arum also says he’s interested in possibly matching Pacquiao against Danny Garcia or Jessie Vargas. Arum promotes Vargas. Those are four options that Arum has mentioned, and he promotes three of those four fighters.
When asked who he wants to match Pacquiao up against for his next fight, Arum said, “The winner of the Crawford-Postol fight; maybe Danny Garcia or maybe the WBO welterweight champion Jessie Vargas.”
As for what Pacquiao should do, Ariza thinks he should stay retired, because he feels that the boxing fans are no longer interested in paying to see his fights in high numbers like they did in the past. Ariza says that Pacquiao’s last fight against Tim Bradley failed to hit even 300,000 pay-per-view buys last April. Ariza sees that as evidence that the fans no longer are interested in paying to see Pacquiao fight on PPV.
“I think he should go off into the sunset,” said Ariza about Pacquiao. “When you go from 1.2 to 1.4 million buys, and you can’t break 300,000 buys, that just shows that the people have lost interest. That shows you that you’re disappointing then fans,” said Ariza.
You can argue that the reason for the low PPV numbers for Pacquiao’s last fight against Tim Bradley last April was because the fight fans didn’t want to see Pacquiao fight Bradley for a third time. Arum promotes Bradley too. It was a bad idea for Pacquiao to fight Bradley after having fought him two other times. It’s unclear if it was Arum’s idea for Pacquiao to fight Bradley once again or Pacquiao’s.
Whatever the case, it was bone-headed move; because it was clear the fight fans didn’t want to see Pacquiao fight Bradley another time. With Pacquiao’s previous fight against Floyd Mayeather Jr. angering many boxing fans last year in May 2015 due to the fight being a disappointing one with little action and with Pacquiao revealing that he was injured afterwards, it was the wrong fight for Pacquiao to fight Bradley.
I think there were guys out there that Pacquiao could have brought in a lot of PPV buys if he had fought them, but Bradley wasn’t one of them. Arum should have matched Pacquiao against the likes of Saul Canelo Alvarez, Danny Garcia, Adrien Broner, Amir Khan or Keith Thurman last April rather than Bradley.