Mayweather says he’ll move when he’s ready, not when he’s told

By Boxing News - 08/26/2010 - Comments

Image: Mayweather says he’ll move when he’s ready, not when he’s toldBy Dave Lahr: The unbeaten Floyd Mayweather Jr. isn’t going to respond when others try to pressure him into fights before he’s ready. The man has his own life and his own timeline for when he wants to make fights. Recently, Bob Arum, Freddie Roach, and HBO tried to get him to make the fight with Pacquiao for November.

Mayweather never said anything about wanting to fight in November, and yet here there was a huge push from one side trying to get boxing’s cash cow to make the fight. Can really blame Mayweather for ignoring them? He’s not going to let other’s call the shots for him.

This is what Mayweather has to say about all this on his Facebook page: “A real boss moves when he’s ready, not when told.” What Mayweather is trying to say is that he won’t be pushed into a fight by Arum, Pacquiao, HBO or Roach and that he is his own boss. He’ll fight Pacquiao when he’s ready to fight him and he’s not afraid of him. Mayweather is living his life and enjoying his success.

When he decides he wants to fight Pacquiao, then you can bet that he’ll give a 100% effort to make the fight happen. The only thing that will likely prevent the fight from being made in the future is if Pacquiao wants a 50-50 deal or refuses to take the random blood tests that Mayweather wants. I think Pacquiao may have a good argument that he deserves an even split with Mayweather if Pacquiao’s fight with Antonio Margarito brings in huge pay per view numbers.

But anything short of 1 million buys means that Mayweather, the cash cow, will be the one that should get the bigger cut of the money. In that case, Pacquiao needs to agree to it or else continue to fight Arum’s stable fighters, Miguel Cotto, Antonio Margarito and Joshua Clottey over and over again until he retires from boxing.
Arum didn’t do himself any favors this last time out by setting up a deadline for Mayweather to respond for a fight with Pacquiao.

That was like the worst possible thing you can say. That made it seem like Arum was calling the shots, despite his fighter Pacquiao having smaller PPV numbers than Mayweather. I’m no promoter but I couldn’t think of a worse thing to say than that. That’s was really not conducive for putting a deal together. It wasn’t as if Arum had a great opponent waiting in the wings to match Pacquiao up with.

Look at who Pacquiao’s fighting – Margarito. This was the fighter that Arum was in a big rush to put Pacquiao in with. Margarito didn’t even have a license until today, and his biggest pay per view numbers of his career is 450,000. Pacquiao and Arum had a chance to fight Mayweather in March, but they quickly abandoned the negotiations when Mayweather asked for Pacquiao to take random blood tests with a cutoff of 14 days.

Instead of agreeing to that, Arum and Pacquiao moved on and fought Joshua Clottey. They gave up on Mayweather to fight Clottey. Unbelievable. Now Pacquiao is fighting Margarito for the vacant WBC junior middleweight title despite Pacquiao having never fought in the division before and Margarito only having fought once in the past six years. And the fight will be held at a catch weight of 151.



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