By Chris Williams: I don’t know if boxing fans realize this, but Bob Arum, the promoter for Manny Pacquiao, seems to have been calling the shots – or at least trying to – for a potential Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Pacquiao bout from the instant the two fighter’s camps were supposedly in talks. Arum has set the date of the fight, November 13th, picked out two venues – the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada or the Cowboy Stadium in Arlington, Texas – and Arum has even come out and given Mayweather mid-July deadline to agree to a contract that supposedly Mayweather and Pacquiao’s teams have agreed to.
Arum is the one that’s speaking and saying that the teams have agreed to the contract terms. So should we believe Arum? Why isn’t Mayweather’s promoters speaking? And it’s incredibly strange the way that Arum seems to be driving this whole process from start to finish. It almost seems as if the whole negotiations between Mayweather and Pacquiao were doomed to fail from the very beginning.
It shouldn’t just be Arum that’s calling all the shots and doing all the heavy lifting. Without Mayweather and his promotional team saying much, we only see Arum saying where the fight will take place, when the deadline. What makes it seem even more odd is that Arum is saying that the contract terms have been agreed upon, but mentions that 14 day window for the blood testing for the last negotiations as Pacquiao’s big concession for this fight.
This was what Mayweather wanted last time during the failed negotiations with Pacquiao, but I hardly see it as what Mayweather will want this time. I think Arum is just spinning his wheels and wasting his time. He might as well have given no deadline at all and just moved on and matched Pacquiao up with one of his other fighters Miguel Cotto or Antonio Margarito. That’s what it looked like was going to happen anyway the moment the so-called negotiations started.
It just seemed like that was what was going to happen just like last time when Arum pulled Pacquiao out of the negotiations and put him with Joshua Clottey, another one of Arum’s Top Rank fighters. I wonder if Arum is going to really try to put together a fight with Mayweather next year like Arum has said he plans on doing. I think he might go through the motions of trying to put together a fight, but with Arum calling the shots, and seemingly dictating a lot of the things for the fight, I somehow see Arum again not having any luck in putting together a fight with Mayweather.
In the end, we’ll probably see Arum matching Pacquiao yet again with one of his own fighters in his stable, either Margarito or Cotto again. Arum only has Margarito, Cotto and Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. for Pacquiao to fight, so there’ a chance that Pacquiao may end up fighting Mayweather someday after Arum has exhausted all those options one to three times each.
Comments are closed.