By Jason Kim: Writer Michael Marley thinks that there’s an 80% chance that the mega fight between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao will be taking place on November 13th. In an article at Examiner.com, Marley says “As of July 4, I say it’s an 80% chance Mayweather-Pacquiao is on for November 13th in Las Vegas. There’s a 10 percent chance both Money May and Pacman fight someone else and not each other in their next fight.” Pacquiao’s promoter Bob Arum has set a July 15th deadline for Mayweather to say whether or not he’ll agree to fight Pacquiao. If not, then Arum will go ahead and substitute either Miguel Cotto or Antonio Margarito in as replacements for Mayweather.
Arum says he will then try to put together the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight in early 2011. However, unless Arum changes whatever there is in the contract that is keeping Mayweather from agreeing, Arum may be waiting on 2012, 2013, 2014 and forever for Mayweather to agree. Instead of bailing on the Mayweather fight or giving a silly deadline, Arum needs to look at what in the contract is keeping Mayweather from agreeing. Abandoning the negotiations to have Pacquiao fight one of Arum’s other Top Rank fighters in his stable won’t fix the Mayweather problem.
If anything, it might make it even worse because a second fight between Pacquiao and Cotto might not even bring in 1 million pay-per-view buys. The public purchased that fight last year and saw Pacquiao easily beat Cotto. And if Arum tries to peddle that same fight again for another $49.95, it might be the equivalent of selling a week-old tunafish sandwich to someone who was poisoned by the same sandwich before. You can sell it once, but there might not be any takers a second time.
This is the thing: If Pacquiao-Cotto does horrible in PPV buys, and Mayweather does better against whoever he faces next, then Mayweather is going to want an even bigger cut of the revenue. Asking for a 50-50 deal, which I suspect is what’s causing Mayweather to not want to agree to the fight, is insane if Mayweather is proving over and over again that he’s the bigger star in terms of PPV buys. This is where the mistake was made after the last negotiations with Mayweather fell apart. Instead of having Pacquiao fight a really popular fighter, Arum decided to match Pacquiao up with one of his less popular fighters in his Top Rank stable with Joshua Clottey.
The casual boxing fan had no clue who Clottey was and stayed away from purchasing this fight. The fight only drew 700,000 PPV buys. Mayweather turned around and fought a popular fighter, Shane Mosley, can came in with an outstanding 1.4 million PPV buys. I think this all could happen again if Arum matches Pacquiao up with either Cotto or Margarito. He needs to go after someone really popular if he wants to bring in the huge numbers. Too bad Oscar De La Hoya retired, because he would be perfect for Pacquiao. Even Ricky Hatton would be good rather than seeing Pacquiao fight Cotto again so soon after his last fight.
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