By Chris Williams: If Manny Pacquiao gets past Jeff Horn this Saturday in Brisbane, Australia, Pacquiao’s promoter Bob Arum is interested in bringing him back in the fall against unbeaten welterweight contender Konstantin Ponomarev in the Philippines, according to ESPN. This would be an in house Top Rank fight. There’s no word yet whether this fight will be on ESPN like this Saturday’s fight. It would be sad if Pacquiao is finished as a PPV fighter.
Ponomarev is one of Arum’s stable fighters in his promotional company. He’s similar to Jeff Horn in terms of talent. It would be a fight that Pacquiao should win and impress his boxing fans in the Philippines. Pacquiao hopes to be president of the Philippines one day. Fighting in his home country is one way to keep his popularity high in his political career.
Arum sees the 24-year-old Ponomarev (32-0, 13 KOs) as a good option for the 38-year-old Pacquiao to fight in his home country of the Philippines, where he hasn’t fought since 2006. Arum isn’t interested in matching Pacquiao against the more popular and more talented 147 lb. fighters Keith Thurman, Danny Garcia and Errol Spence Jr., as he doesn’t see them as being well-known enough for Pacquiao to fight on pay-per-view.
Arum views those fights as bringing in around 300,000 to 400,000 buys. Ponomarev wouldn’t likely be a PPV fight. The revenue for that fight would be coming from the Philippines rather through PPV.
“One guy we could match Manny with is Ponomarev. He’s a very tough kid. He’s undefeated and he’s a good fighter, but there could be others,” Arum said to Dan Rafael of ESPN.com.
The Russian Ponomarev has some decent quality victories over Ed Paredes, Silverio Ortiz and Brad Solomon in the last year. Top Rank hasn’t pushed Ponomarev to put him in with a good fighter that could potentially expose him. There was talk of Ponomarev fighting Errol Spence Jr. in an IBF welterweight eliminator fight last year, but fortunately for Ponomarev, that didn’t happen. Spence ended up destroying Leonard Bundu to get locked in as the IBF mandatory for Kell Brook.
It’s interesting that Arum is mainly focused on matching Pacquiao against lesser fighters at this point in his career, and most of those fighters are in his Top Rank stable. Some would look at that and think Arum is just keeping fights in house so he can increase the popularity of his obscure stable fighters, who likely would have a very hard time ever making a name for themselves based on their talent level. Jeff Horn would have a very hard time if not for Arum.
You could say the same thing about Pacquiao’s last opponent Jessie Vargas. You can’t throw Jessie Vargas into the ring with the likes of Keith Thurman, Errol Spence Jr. and Shawn Porter and expect him to come out of it with a victory. He’s not that type of talent. But Arum did Vargas a big favor in matching Pacquiao against him.
”Manny versus Thurman or the other guys in the division, while they would be good fights and they are good fighters, will do mediocre numbers on pay-per-view. Maybe 300,000 or 400,000 buys. Look at the fight we did with Manny and Jessie Vargas. It did nothing on pay-per-view, maybe 250,000 buys.”
It’s scary how Arum doesn’t appear to realize that Jessie Vargas isn’t viewed as one of the top talents in the welterweight division. Vargas is not a popular fighter in the boxing world. The reason why Pacquiao-Vargas did such poor numbers on PPV is because Vargas was seen as a paper champion in the minds of a lot of fans. Vargas was beaten just last year by Tim Bradley. I saw hat fight and the only round I gave to Vargas was the 12th, when Bradley got sloppy and was hurt. Other than that, Vargas was briefly a world champion at 140 after winning controversial decisions over Khabib Allakhverdiev and Anton Novikov. Of course, Pacquiao vs. Vargas brought in poor numbers, because it wasn’t a good opponent for Pacquiao. If I were the promoter for Pacquiao, I would never match him against Vargas, Horn, Rios, Chris Algieri or Joshua Clottey. I would have known that those fights wouldn’t have increased his popularity and wouldn’t bring in a lot of PPV buys. Arum is matching Pacquiao against a lot of fighters that aren’t doing much in increasing his popularity, and he doesn’t seem to realize that.
I disagree with Arum that Pacquiao vs. Thurman would bring in only 400,000 buys. I think it would do a lot more than 400,000 buys. Those are the amount of buys that we saw from Pacquiao in being matched against Tim Bradley for a third time. The Pacquiao-Bradley rivalry was played out after their first 2 fights. After Pacquiao beat Bradley in their rematch in 2014, he effectively closed the door on the rivalry against Bradley.
For Arum to stick Pacquiao in with Bradley after that for a third time, it looked like a move that wasn’t well thought out. It’s like playing the same move over and over against for a month straight in a small town and expecting people to keep paying to see it. Arum should have gotten a clue and moved on and been a little more inventive with Pacquiao’s match-making. There would be a huge benefit for Pacquiao to fight someone like Keith Thurman. If Pacquiao were to beat Thurman, he could show the boxing world that he’s the best fighter in the 147 lb. division.
That move would in turn help bring Pacquiao’s popularity back to some extent. You can argue that a big factor in Pacquiao’s popularity nose-diving is the lack of interesting fights that Arum has been putting him in with. Arum isn’t matching Pacquiao against the best. He’s putting him in with Jeff Horn, Jessie Vargas, Tim Bradley, Chris Algieri and Brandon Rios.
The disappointing thing about Arum matching Pacquiao against Jeff Horn on Saturday night is it’s a no win situation for Pacquiao. It’s not a good opponent. If Pacquiao loses the fight, there would be no coming back from a defeat of that nature. Pacquiao would also have to retire from boxing. If Pacquiao has a hard time in beating Horn, then he’ll still be seen as being over-the-hill and it’ll be like a loss. An easy win for Pacquiao over Horn won’t get him any credit from the boxing public because Horn isn’t well-known.
It’s always better for a fighter to face the very best if they want to recover acclaim. It doesn’t pay off to fight obscure opposition when you’re at the level where Pacquiao is right now. It doesn’t increase a fighter’s popularity to be matched against mediocre fighters.
The Pacquiao vs. Horn fight will be televised this Saturday night on July 1 on ESPN and ESPN Desportes. The start time for boxing fans to watch the fight is at 9:00 p.m. ET/6:00 p.m. PT. The Pacquiao-Horn fight will be taking place at the Suncorp Stadium in Brisbane, Australia. There will be over 50,000 fans that will be attending the fight. Pacquiao likes the idea of fighting in front of a huge rowd like that. Hopefully the fight won’t wind up with a controversial decision. That’s something that you always have to be on the lookout for when you have a visiting fighter coming to a foreign country and fighting in front of a big crowd.