By Chris Williams: Bob Arum wanted to match his fighter Manny Pacquiao up with Floyd Mayweather Jr for Manny’s next fight on May 7th. Instead, Arum and Pacquiao will have to settle for fading 39-year-old star Shane Mosley, who is nowhere near the same kind of star as unbeaten Floyd Mayweather Jr. But more importantly, Mosley won’t bring in anywhere near the same kind of cash that the Mayweather-Pacquiao bout would have brought in with pay-per-view buys. It’s just no comparisons.
In an interview with Chris Mannix at sportsillustrated, Arum said “We [Pacquiao] put it off as long as we could. He [Mayweather] has been totally incommunicado. All he had to do was pick up a phone and say, ‘Hey Bob, wait a week, two weeks’ and we would have waited. He could have given us a signal. No one knows how to get a hold of him. The only ones who know how to get a hold of him are the police.”
Naturally, Arum wants to match Pacquiao up against Mayweather, because even if Pacquiao gets totally spanked, which is what I see happening, Arum and Pacquiao would walk away with a huge payday each and there would really no point in Pacquiao continuing to fight after that bout. I’m sure Arum could put him back in his Top Rank circuit of matching him against his faded guys like Antonio Margarito, Joshua Clottey or Miguel Cotto, but that’s the point? The Mayweather fight would be the cash out fight for Pacquiao and I see that as the conclusion of his career. But it looks like Arum is going to have to keep Pacquiao on the circuit for awhile longer, maybe a lot longer, while they wait to see what happens with Mayweather’s legal problems.
They may not like what they hear if he ends up doing serious time. For the 33-year-old Mayweather, any time would be almost fatal to his career. Sure, he could likely continue if he’s in for a short stretch but if it’s three years or more, I think we’d be seeing a different Mayweather when he comes out and not the dominant one that he was previously.
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