Arum: My goal is to make Tim Bradley a major star

By Boxing News - 10/11/2011 - Comments

Image: Arum: My goal is to make Tim Bradley a major starBy Chris Williams: Bob Arum recently signed WBO light welterweight champion Timothy Bradley (27-0, 11 KO’s) to his Top Rank stable in hopes of turning him into a pay per view star, and possibly to match him up against his number #1 fighter Manny Pacquiao in 2012.

Arum has already placed the 28-year-old Bradley as the co-main event on Pacquiao’s fight against Juan Manuel Marquez on November 12th. Bradley will be fighting 40-year-old southpaw Joel Casamayor in a scheduled 12 round.

Pacquiao is also a southpaw, which seems to indicate that the Bradley-Casamayor fight is a tune-up bout for Bradley to get ready for Pacquiao next year. Casamayor isn’t much of a threat to Bradley due his age and his struggles recently. Casamayor has lost two out of his last four fights.

Arum told the Los Angeles Times “Our goal is to make Tim Bradley one of the major stars in boxing. We know he is one of the best fighters, but that doesn’t make him a star.”

Bradley is one of the top fighters at light welterweight, but he’s been unable to gain much of a fan following despite his unbeaten record for some reason. Arum likely wants to try and match Golden Boy’s success that they’ve had in maneuvering their fighter IBF/WBA light welterweight champion Amir Khan into becoming a star.

Khan still isn’t a star, but with the help of Golden Boy’s careful matchmaking, Khan is on his way to becoming a star. He just needs some important wins over the likes of Floyd Mayweather Jr., Manny Pacquiao, Shane Mosley, Mike Jones and Kell Brook and he’ll be there.

Arum is going to have a lot tougher time in trying to build Bradley into a star because he’s not particularly interesting to watch, and he lacks size and power at light welterweight. Bradley could be moved up to welterweight, where his lack of size and power will be even more of a problem for him. Arum will likely fail in making Bradley a big star whether he matches Bradley with Pacquiao or not.

Bradley won’t beat Pacquiao, and fans won’t care about him after he loses unless he doesn’t something really special in that fight like knocking Pacquiao down multiple times. That won’t happen because Bradley’s not a huge banger. As such, Arum’s dream of making Bradley a huge star will probably go up in smoke with boxing fans remaining lukewarm towards him. It takes a brawling style of fighting combined with power to make a star out of fighters nowadays and Bradley isn’t a brawler and he doesn’t have a lot of power.



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