By William Mackay: Unbeaten Floyd Mayweather Jr. (41-0, 25 KO’s) has a big decision to make for next week when his deadline is up to say whether he’ll be taking a fight in November against WBO welterweight champion Manny Pacquiao. Bob Arum, Pacquiao’s promoter from Top Rank, has given Mayweather until mid-July to agree to the fight with Pacquiao or else Arum will match Pacquiao up with either of his two Top Rank fighters Miguel Cotto or Antonio Margarito.
It’s unknown what’s holding Mayweather back, because a fight against Pacquiao would likely give him the biggest payday of Mayweather’s career, even bigger than the $40 million he reportedly made for his May 1st win over Shane Mosley. However, there are a couple of things that could be holding Mayweather back from agreeing to a fight against Pacquiao. To start with, Mayweather wants a bigger percentage of the money than Pacquiao.
Although the two fighters agreed to a 50-50 deal earlier this year during the first time their teams attempted to put a fight together between them, things have changed since then. Pacquiao’s substitute opponent Joshua Clottey failed to bring in large PPV numbers for Pacquiao’s fight on March 13th, bringing in only 700,000 pay per view buys. And, Mayweather’s fight against Mosley was a huge success with the fight ending up with a very impressive 1.4 million PPV buys, double Pacquiao’s recent numbers.
The other problem is that’s likely holding Mayweather back is that he wants random blood tests for his fight against Pacquiao, but Pacquiao is only agreeing to tests up until 14 days before the fight. This is a slight improvement over what Pacquiao agreed to during the first negotiations for a fight against Mayweather. At that time, Pacquiao wanted the blood testing to stop at 24 days and Mayweather wanted a 14 day cutoff. However, that probably won’t be good enough this time, because Mayweather has said in interviews that he wants the full testing.
Since Pacquiao is already agreeing to testing 14 days before the fight, he might as well give in and agree to the full testing that Mayweather wants. If Pacquiao really wants the fight with Mayweather, he might need to give in on this and agree to the full testing. Mayweather doesn’t seem to be willing to fight Pacquiao unless he gets his way on this. As for the purse split, that’s a harder matter. If Mayweather wants a bigger cut, I seriously doubt he’s going to get Pacquiao to agree to anything less than 50-50. Mayweather can hold out, but I think he’s wasting his time on this.
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