By Chris Williams: Maybe it’s just a sad coincidence but promoter Bob Arum has picked positively the worst time to get excited about matching Manny Pacquiao up with WBC/WBO light welterweight champion Timothy Bradley (27-0, 11 KO’s) following Bradley’s poor performance against WBC light welterweight champion Devon Alexander last weekend. Bradley may have won the fight but he really looked bad, showing zero power, average hand speed, no size and a tendency to ram heads with Alexander.

He won the fight, but Bradley looked well below other top fighters in the light welterweight division Amir Khan, Marcos Maidana, and Lucas Matthysse. Why is Arum getting excited about putting Pacquiao in with Bradley now that he looks horrible? I didn’t hear Arum getting excited about Bradley-Pacquiao when Bradley was easily beating guys like Lamont Peterson and Edner Cherry. Arum likes the idea of matching Pacquiao and Bradley if the fight can be built up properly over time so that Bradley is more of a star.

Arum says he would like to promote Bradley if he decides not to stay with his current promoter Gary Shaw when his contract with him comes up in May. It’s doubtful that Bradley will decide to stay with Shaw, because Arum or Golden Boy Promotions, both of which have huge cash, will likely get into a bidding war to try and get Bradley’s services. I can see Bradley signing with Arum just because it will give him an excellent chance of fighting Pacquiao in the future. If Bradley does sign with Arum, I can see him being steered away from guys like Khan, Matthysse, Victor Ortiz and Maidana and instead matched carefully for a year to build up his record more before being put in with Pacquiao to be slaughtered.

I can’t see Arum putting Bradley in with Khan or Maidana, because there’s too much of a chance that he’ll lose to those guys. I see it was the same situation with Juan Manuel Lopez and Yuirorkis Gamboa, both of which fight for Arum. He’s matching these guys carefully, fight after fight, against guys they can easily beat hoping that they’ll become popular enough this way for their eventual fight to be bigger. The problem is they’re not being matched against popular enough opponents to get very popular. I see Arum doing this with Bradley. Arum already said he wouldn’t have put Bradley and Alexander together this soon. Instead he would have let it build for another year or so. What we would have gotten as fans a year from now would be more disappointment, because we would have been fooled into thinking both of these guys were better than they actually were and would be really let down. It doesn’t matter that it came a year later, we would be really let down and feel upset.