By William Mackay: Top Rank promoter Bob Arum, 78, says that his fighter World Boxing Organization welterweight champion Manny Pacquiao has agreed to the drug testing and is ready to fight undefeated Floyd Mayweather Jr. as soon as Floyd makes the decision to fight Manny. In an article at Sportinglife.com, Arum says “I’m telling you now, I’ve had long conversations with him, Manny Pacquiao’s first goal is to get Mayweather in the ring and this whole drug-testing nonsense – I think it was nonsense, but Manny has now agreed. He’s [Pacquiao] agreed, so now that’s not an issue. So now the ball’s in Mayweather’s court and if Mayweather doesn’t fight him, that’s Mayweather’s decision and he has every right to make that decision. If I was Mayweather I wouldn’t want to fight Pacquiao either.”

What Arum doesn’t say is what part of the drug testing that Pacquiao has agreed to. The last we heard, Pacquiao had agreed to the blood testing for performance enhancing drugs but with a cutoff of 14 days before the fight. To be sure, this is exactly what Mayweather, 33, had asked for during the first negotiations in January 2010. However, Pacquiao wouldn’t agree to that testing cutoff at that time and wanted to go no further than 24 days before their planned fight. Since the negotiations failed at that point, Mayweather and Pacquiao are starting all over again and what worked before, likely won’t work this time because Mayweather has picked up an impressive win over Shane Mosley last month in May.

Mayweather dominated Mosley, beating him by a 12 round unanimous decision. Pacquiao, in contrast, chose Joshua Clottey to fight and beat him by a one-sided 12 round decision on March 13th, but didn’t look nearly as impressive as Mayweather. Beyond the issue of Mayweather looking better against an arguably better opponent in Mosley, his fight did twice as well as Pacquiao’s fight with Clottey, bringing in 1.4 million pay-per-view buys compared to 700,000 for Pacquiao-Clottey.

So now that Pacquiao has agreed to the 14 day cutoff that Mayweather wanted last time, it might be meaningless for this round of negotiations because Mayweather could want Pacquiao to agree to blood testing all the way up to the fight before he agrees to get in the ring with him. There’s also the issue of the purse split. Arum isn’t mentioning the particulars about that either nor of what exactly Pacquiao has agreed to for the drug testing. If Arum is talking about the 14 days and the 50-50 cut of the revenue, chances are that might not be good enough to land the big prize of getting Mayweather in the ring this time.

Miguel Cotto, another one of Arum’s fighters, defeated Yuri Foreman by a 9th round KO on Saturday, capturing the WBA junior middleweight title at Yankee Stadium. Many people are under the impression that Cotto only bothered to go after the title because he wanted to get the title to use a lure for Pacquiao to go after it to see if he can win an 8th world title. With the millions that Cotto made in his 12th round knockout loss to Pacquiao last November, you can understand why he would want to win the WBA title.

Arum had this to say about Cotto: ”We don’t what’s happening among the elite fighters. Miguel now goes back to being an elite fighter and a lot of things will be decided if, for example, the Pacquiao-Mayweather fight comes together. When that piece of the puzzle is decided these are fighters out there that could make very attractive fights, like, for example, [Antonio] Margarito and Miguel. So, we’ll see, there’s no sense rushing in.”

Cotto previously lost to Margarito by an 11th round TKO in July 2008, and has said that he isn’t interested in fighting Margarito again. But Cotto might change his mind if he received the right amount of dollar signs. However, I think Cotto much prefers to wait and see what happens with the Pacquiao-Mayweather fight. If the fight doesn’t take place, Cotto would be in the prime position, due to him winning the WBA junior middleweight title, to lure Pacquiao into a rematch.

It would be something that would be a plus for Pacquiao, Cotto and Arum, but maybe not so much for the regular boxing fan because Pacquiao pretty much established that he is a much better fighter than Cotto when he totally dominated him last year. It’s nice that Cotto defeated Foreman last night, but Cotto would probably be destroyed just as easily in a rematch with Pacquiao as he was the first time. It wasn’t even interesting to watch the Cotto-Pacquiao fight because it was such a slaughter. It was like watching a mismatch that are typically shown between young up and coming fighters when they’re being matched against someone who’s not in their class.