By Chris Williams: Top Rank promoter Bob Arum is eyeing November as the perfect date for a mega fight between undefeated Floyd Mayweather Jr. (41-0, 25 KO’s) and World Boxing Organization (WBO) Manny Pacquiao (51-3-2, 38 KO’s), according to Michael Marley of Examiner.com. Arum says “I had my doubts on Mayweather wanting it [the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight] but now Floyd genuinely wants the fight against Manny. Floyd knows you can’t putter around…If everything goes well, a good time for that fight would be November, that would be the perfect time.”
It’s unclear what Arum is referring to when he said that he had doubts about Mayweather wanting the fight. If Arum thinks that by Mayweather wanting Pacquiao to agree to Olympic style random blood tests that his means that Floyd doesn’t want the fight, then I don’t know what to think. All Mayweather wanted was to ensure that he was fighting a clean fighter, one that was not using anything. Mayweather has seemed to really want the fight from day one and I don’t see his asking for blood testing as a signal that he wasn’t serious about fighting Pacquiao.
If I twisted the things in my head maybe I could arrive at what Arum seems to be suggesting. Mayweather previously agreed to the $10 million penalty for every pound over the weight limit during the last negotiations with Pacquiao. That’s a huge thing and one that would have hurt Mayweather – the bigger fighter – a lot more than Pacquiao, yet Mayweather agreed with it. The one thing that Mayweather asked for was the blood testing, which should have been a simple enough thing to do. It came down to Pacquiao wanting the testing to be stopped at 24 days before the fight and Mayweather wanting it to stop at 14 days.
The negotiations stopped at this point and Pacquiao moved on and fought Joshua Clottey instead on March 13th, in a fight that turned out to be horribly one-sided and dull fight. It was supposed to be a more exciting fight than a Mayweather-Pacquiao, according to Pacquiao’s trainer Freddie Roach. Few people believed that and it turned out to be just as one-sided as a lot of people suspected. In the past, Arum has said that there would be no concessions given to Mayweather. But it looks like Arum has changed his mind, because otherwise there would be no fight. Will the $10 million weight penalty be a part of the new negotiations? That will be a point of interest, as will the amount of days that Pacquiao’s team will be asking for the blood testing to be stopped before the fight. Roach recently mentioned 17 or 18 days being the halfway point between 24 and 14 days.
Arum says “This is the biggest fight of all time, Mayweather against Pacquiao, and it has to happen. Now the fight is doable.” What exactly has changed from last time? Now it’s doable? From what I remember, it was Arum and Pacquiao that broke off the negotiations last time. Mayweather was still willing to negotiate. How are thing different from last time?
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