By Chris Williams: Without coming out and saying that his deadline is up next week, Top Rank promoter Bob Arum hinted about it in an interview from Mike Marley of Examiner.com when asked about a “drop dead” date, saying “If Mayweather accepts, if we have the fight for November…we’ll know that by next Saturday and., if it is a go, we will announce it on the following Monday.”
Next week will mark the middle of July, which is the ultimatum that Arum recently gave to Mayweather to say whether or not he agrees to take the fight with Manny Pacquiao.
If Mayweather doesn’t open his trap and say he’ll take the fight, then Arum will quickly match Pacquiao up with either Antonio Margarito or Miguel Cotto, both of which fight for Arum. Neither of them are particularly interesting bouts, to be sure, but both are a heck of a lot more appealing than the last fighter that Arum matched Pacquiao up with when he put him in with fellow Top Rank fighter Joshua Clottey for a stinker of a fight on March 13th and one that failed to sell in high numbers on pay-per-view.
It’s unknown what’s holding Mayweather back because he’s not speaking about the negotiations. Some people think he’s not interested in fighting and will take his recent huge winnings in his fights with Juan Manuel Marquez and Shane Mosley and will spend the next year or two blowing it all on gambling and jewelry.
Then again, others think that Mayweather just isn’t satisfied with Pacquiao’s concessions of a 14 day cutoff for the blood testing and the 50-50 purse split from last time. If Mayweather keeps doing better numbers on PPV, then a fight between him and Pacquiao will likely never happen, because Pacquiao will probably keep asking for a 50-50 deal, despite getting the smaller PPV numbers, and Mayweather won’t go along with that.
Pacquiao may get limited numbers in future PPV bouts if he continues to fight Cotto over and over again, and a fight against Margarito will probably be a disappointment as well, because he looked horrible in losing to Shane Mosley last year and didn’t look good in his comeback fight against Ricardo Garcia.
Arum might better off going outside of his stable if he wants to ensure that Pacquiao keeps getting good PPV numbers rather than seeing them go downward with each fight.
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