Pacquiao WON’T be fighting on Horn-Crawford card on April 14

By Boxing News - 02/28/2018 - Comments

Image: Pacquiao WON’T be fighting on Horn-Crawford card on April 14

By Chris Williams: The Jeff Horn vs. Terence Crawford card on April 14th WON’T have former 8 division world champion Manny Pacquiao on the card, according to RingTV. Pacquiao (59-7-2, 28 KOs) won’t be accepting the undercard assignment offered to him by his long-time promoters at Top Rank.

Pacquiao, 39, was supposed to be fighting in the co-feature on the card against 37-year-old Mike Alvarado.

Without Pacquiao on the Horn vs. Crawford card on the 14th of April, it will make it tough to sell the card on ESPN PPV. There was talk that the card would be televised on pay-per-view. It’s unknown if Top Rank will go ahead and place it on ESPN PPV without Pacquiao. Horn is an unknown with the casual boxing fans, and Crawford is still light years away from becoming a PPV attraction.

It would work against Crawford to have his fight with Horn on PPV unless there’s a way of having a replay on regular ESPN the following week. Crawford needs to be seen as much as possible by boxing fans to build his brand. Putting him on PPV against Horn would be a bad idea.

What’s hard to understand is why Top Rank ever wanted Pacquiao to fight on the Horn-Crawford undercard in the first place. How could Top Rank not realize how this would be viewed by Pacquiao, who has been the promotional company’s top pay-per-view star for many years? Offering Pacquiao a fight against the past his prime former light welterweight champion Alvarado was a terrible idea as well. But offering Pacquiao an undercard spot, you must wonder who came up with that idea.

“Pacquiao will not be fighting on the undercard of the Crawford-Horn fight. It’s an insult to him,” Pacquiao’s media manager Zonio Aquiles said to RingTV.com.

Pacquiao’s spot on the Horn-Crawford undercard will be replaced by IBF super flyweight champion Jerwin Ancajas (29-1-1, 20 KOs), who could be defending his title against #1 IBF Jonas Sultan (14-3, 9 KOs). It’s a good fight, and it might even steal the show from the main event between Crawford and Horn. That fight will likely be a mismatch with Crawford making easy work of Horn. It’ll be interesting to see if Horn tries to rough Crawford up the way he did with Pacquiao last July.

Pacquiao has been out of the ring since getting beaten by the 29-year-old Horn by a highly questionable 12 round unanimous decision last summer on July 2 at the Suncorp Stadium in Brisbane, Australia.

Pacquiao was roughed up in that fight by Horn for 12 rounds without the Australian being penalized. Pacquiao being put in the situation where he had to fight Horn in Australia in the first place is a difficult one to understand. Why did Top Rank take their only PPV star Pacquiao and have him fight in Horn’s home country? It was an odd move on their part. Pacquiao is a star. He shouldn’t have had to fight a little known Australian fighter in his own country. If anything, Pacquiao should have been fighting in the Philippines rather than Australia.

Pacquiao’s trainer Freddie Roach says he’s not sure if he’ll be with him for his next fight. He hasn’t heard from Pacquiao in a while.

“I usually leave him alone until I hear from him but I’ve called him five times and haven’t heard back. Maybe he changed his number,” Roach said to the latimes.com.

There’s no word whether Pacquiao will keep Roach or not. If Pacquiao makes a clean sweep, he could replace Roach with someone a little more assertive in his corner.