By Sean McDaniel: If things don’t work out in putting together a fight against Floyd Mayweather Jr. in the near future, the March 13th bout against Joshua Clottey could be the end of the 31-year-old Pacquiao’s 15 year pro career. It would be sad and unfortunate if the Clottey fight is the one that Manny goes out because it frankly doesn’t live up to the expectations that many boxing fans have for Pacquiao. His trainer Freddie Roach said recently that the Clottey fight could be the end for Pacquiao unless they can work out a deal for a fight against Mayweather.

That likely won’t happen unless the boxing public all of a sudden gets interested in the Pacquiao-Clottey bout, because of now the response to the fight has been lukewarm at best. However, Pacquiao has a huge amount of diehard Filipino fans who live in the U.S. who will likely scoop up the fight without even batting an eye.

The reason this even matters is because Mayweather has said that if his fight against Shane Mosley on May 1st does better than the Pacquiao-Clottey, then Mayweather will want more than the previous 50-50 deal for the revenue split with Pacquiao. It’s not exactly a fair thing for Mayweather to do, because Pacquiao’s promotional team Top Rank is the one that hand-picked Clottey, another Top Rank fighter, and Pacquiao had nothing to do with it.

But because of Clottey’s obscure status with casual boxing fans, many of them which have never heard Clottey’s name before, it was almost too simple for Mayweather to come in afterwards and fight a better known opponent than Clottey to fight to try and hog the limelight for an upcoming pay-per-view bout.

The Pacquiao-Clottey might do well because of all his fans, but it’s doubtful it will be able to compete with the Mayweather-Mosley bout because of the popularity of both Mayweather and Mosley. Also, Mayweather is working really hard in trying to promote the Mosley bout by giving interview after interview to the media. Pacquiao doesn’t have this luxury because he’s too busy training for the Clottey bout to be available to try and promote the fight.

But even if Pacquiao was trying to be more available for the promotion of the fight, it still wouldn’t likely have the same effect as Mayweather, mainly because Mayweather speaks English, is more outgoing and is more prone to say tasty sound bites to the media. Pacquiao, a shy and quiet person by nature, can’t compete with that. Pacquiao is a great singer, but he seems to get tongue tied when giving interviews and rarely boasts about his skills like Mayweather.

It’s too bad, because unless his fight does as good as the Mayweather bout, then Floyd will insist on getting a bigger purse than Pacquiao when they do attempt to negotiate a fight. And there’s no way Pacquiao will take less than 50%.

On top of that, Mayweather is going to make things harder for Pacquiao by insisting that he take random blood tests all the way up to their fight. This, too, is something that Pacquiao won’t likely do. So if Roach knows what he’s talking about when he says that Pacquiao will likely retire if he can’t fight Mayweather next, then the Clottey fight could be the last one of Pacquiao’s career.