By Allan Fox: Top Rank star Manny Pacquiao will be fighting on November 5th at the Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas, Nevada, according to his promoter Bob Arum in speaking to RingTV. Arum has had Pacquiao mostly fighting in Las Vegas for the last eight years. The only deviation from this norm was when Arum had Pacquiao fighting in Texas and Macao, China.
As for who the 37-year-old Pacquiao will be fighting, Arum still seems very, very interested in having him fight the winner of this Saturday’s light welterweight unification match between Terence Crawford and Viktor Postol.
Arum has also mentioned WBO welterweight champion Jessie Vargas as a possibility if Pacquiao can’t get down to 140 to fight the Crawford-Postol winner. Pacquiao wants to fight for a world title, so it would be important that he gets down to 140 if he’s persuaded by the 84-year-old Arum to fight the Crawford vs. Postol winner.
Arum promotes Crawford, Postol and Vargas, so it’s a win-win for him and for his promotional company Top Rank. It’s unknown if Pacquiao has the ability to turn down Arum’s choices of opponents. It’s likely that Arum will let Pacquiao know that those are his best choices for November 5 in terms of pay-per-view revenue.
The problem that Pacquiao has is that none of the guys that Arum wants him to pick from is a PPV fighter in a real sense. Crawford vs. Postol is being televised this Saturday on HBO PPV only because HBO doesn’t have any dates for that fight to be shown on regular HBO.
Arum is still hoping that fight fans will want to pay money to see Crawford and Postol fight, but it’s not likely that will be the case. It’s unknown what the break even number is in terms of PPV buys. It would likely be something very low, because it’s crazy to assume that over 100,000 fans would purchase the Crawford vs. Postol fight on PPV. If they did, it might lead to more less than popular fighters having their fights televised on PPV. That would be bad for boxing.
Danny Garcia and Adrien Broner, two non-Top Rank fighters, were in the running for the Pacquiao fight. Broner was said to have asked for too much money, and Garcia reportedly turned down an offer of $3-4 million. Broner is going to be doing a 30-day stint in jail for being late for his court appearance last Tuesday, so he’s not going to be able to take the fight even if he dropped his asking price.
“We tried to make a fight with one of Al Haymon’s guys and we weren’t able to do it, so the judge got angry and threw him into prison,” Arum said to ringtv.com. “No, Al tried (to make the fight with Pacquiao) but couldn’t do it.”
Pacquiao’s last fight against Tim Bradley reportedly brought in around 300,000 PPV buys last April in their third fight. It was a bad idea for Arum to match Pacquiao against Bradley yet again, because fans had already seen them fight twice before. Sticking them together again appeared to be a money grab attempt in the eyes of many boxing fans. Arum also promotes Bradley, so you can understand why it was a fight that was beneficial for him to make at the time.