By Chris Williams: Fans of Manny Pacquiao (51-3-2, 38 KO’s) may cry and complain that Floyd Mayweather Jr. (41-0, 25 KO’s) refuses to fight Pacquiao, but you need to stop and realize that Pacquiao and Bob Arum blew their chance to fight Mayweather when they wouldn’t agree with what Mayweather wanted with the random blood testing. Pacquiao had the perfect opportunity to fight Mayweather during their negotiations in January of this year when Mayweather asked for the drug testing to be stopped at 14 days before the fight. Pacquiao wouldn’t agree to anything closer than 24 days. That’s where ended. Who’s fault was it that the fight didn’t get put together? Pacquiao should have groveled and been submissive to Floyd.
I’d say it was Pacquiao’s fault because why not agree to the 14 days that Mayweather wanted when it was a small amount of blood that was going to be taken from Pacquiao. It wasn’t as if they were going to drain quarts of blood from Pacquiao’s body and leave him a dried out husk. If you ask me, that was the missed opportunity for the fight to have been made. Everything else was agreed upon except the blood testing. 24 days? Man, that it is too much time in between blood testing and that was the missed opportunity.
Pacquiao and Arum could have stuck it out and continued to negotiate and met Mayweather at say 17 or 18 days for the blood testing. Instead, they ran off and fought another Top Rank fighter Joshua Clottey and ended up with 700,000 pay per view buys, which isn’t comparable to the 1+ Pacquiao had been doing in his fights with Miguel Cotto and Oscar De La Hoya. Pacquiao should told Arum to hold his horses and wait until the negoitiations with Mayweather had been completed. They didn’t need to rush into the fight with Clottey. I saw that as a move to get one more payday in before Pacquiao was totally dominated by Mayweather. It worked horribly, because if Arum and Pacquiao knew anything about Mayweather, they should have realized how difficult it is to negotiate a fight with him.
If you’ve got pretty much everything negotiated, the last thing you want to do is bail over a small issue like the blood testing to take on a lesser fighter in the same stable as you. I don’t think that move helped Pacquiao at all. It may have saved him from a beating from Mayweather, but it left him with a smaller payday and he ended up taking a lot of punishment in the Clottey fight. Now, Pacquiao is going to be taking on Antonio Margarito instead of Mayweather, and Margarito probably isn’t anymore popular than Clottey.
This fight doesn’t have boxing fans excited. If you don’t believe me, checked out the internet forums. No one is talking about the hardly. No one thinks Margarito will win. It’s a crummy choice. This all goes back to the negotiations with Mayweather. Pacquiao had their big chance to fight the cash cow and they blew it. Now they have to be satisfied with fighting Margarito, and Miguel Cotto over and over again. I have no idea how many times Pacquiao can fight those guys before the boxing public get sick of seeing needless rematches. That hasn’t been a rematch Pacquiao and Margarito, but I bet there will be even if the fight is one-sided and it will be because Margarito can’t fight anymore.
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