By Chris Williams: With only five months away from the November fight month that Top Rank promoter Bob Arum has designed for the Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Manny Pacquiao mega fight, this would be the perfect time for the negotiations to wrap up so that they ‘re management teams can start to market the fight properly. Five months to market the Mayweather-Pacquiao would be ideal, because there would be plenty of time to advertise and get the causal boxing fans interested in this fight in a huge way.
If the negotiations take longer and creep into July, August and September, it could really mess up the ability of Arum and Golden Boy Promotions to sell this fight. Of course, the fight will be hugely successful no matter what, but it will do so much better if they’re able to wrap up the negotiations five months before the fight date, so that they can start building up the momentum for this fight now.
As for the training for the bout, I think Mayweather can be ready for Pacquiao’s style almost immediately. Mayweather is a fighter that can adapt to any style on the fly and come up with a strategy to beat it. He doesn’t need three long months of hard training and strategy sessions to come up with a plan to beat Pacquiao.
Mayweather has such a brilliant boxing mind that he can come up with the perfect plan in an instant without needing a guru like trainer Freddie Roach. Pacquiao, however, is going to need at least three good months of training for him to have even a small chance of beating Mayweather. Roach has to come up with the perfect plan and Pacquiao has to follow it to the letter for Pacquiao to have a chance of beating Mayweather.
Floyd is just too hard to really train for and all the idea that Roach will likely have will probably involve things that Mayweather has already seen many times during his career. Roach will likely give Pacquiao instructions to bum rush Mayweather, throw a lot of right hooks and look to overwhelm him with punches once Manny traps Mayweather near the ropes. In other words, Roach will have Pacquiao do pretty much what he always does in his fights.
If it’s successful, Roach can glow about it afterwards and talk about how he came up with the perfect plan to beat Mayweather, when in all likelihood, it will be the same old thing that Pacquiao does every fight. Pacquiao needs to have more than a plan to beat Mayweather; He needs a lot of luck and he needs Mayweather to do something really stupid like try to fight on the ropes for extended periods of time and try to slug with Pacquiao.
If Manny can catch Mayweather with a big shot like Shane Mosley did in the 2nd round of their fight in May, then Pacquiao would have an excellent chance of stopping Mayweather. Pacquiao won’t run out of gas suddenly like Mosley did and if he does, Pacquiao is young enough to get his second wind almost immediately, unlike Mosley.
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