By Chris Williams: Leonard Ellerbe, one of Floyd Mayweather Jr’s advisors, says that Mayweather is dead serious about his offer he made earlier today to fight WBO welterweight champion Manny Pacquiao on May 5th in Las Vegas.

Mayweather said to Pacquiao on his twitter “Manny Pacquiao, I’m calling you out. Let’s fight May 5th and give the world what they want to see. Step up, Punk.”

Ellberbe backed that up, saying to Dan Rafael on ESPN “You heard him.”

However, none of this means anything if Pacquiao’s promoter Bob Arum won’t unleash Pacquiao to let him out to take the fight. Arum has been holding Pacquiao back for the past couple of year putting him instead with one Top Rank stable fighter after another. Pacquiao has done Arum a lot of favors by facing Arum’s fighters from his Top Rank stable and making a lot of money for them while at the same time saving Arum from having to deal with other promoters for these in house fights.

Mayweather doesn’t have very much time before he has to start serving his 90-day jail term. He was able to get a delay until June 1st, so he needs Pacquiao to fight him in early May in order to keep him from being pushed to the deadline of his jail term.

As of now, Arum is meeting with Pacquiao in the Philippines to decide on Pacquiao’s next fight. Arum wants nothing to do with Mayweather for Pacquiao’s next fight and is still looking at four names – Timothy Bradley, Miguel Cotto, Lamont Peterson and Juan Manuel Marquez. Arum has ruled Mayweather out as an opponent because he feels Pacquiao won’t be ready to fight in May because he needs more time for his cut to heal from the Marquez fight, even though cuts rarely need more than six months tops for them to be completely healed. In this case, Arum feels Pacquiao’s cut, which didn’t seem at all, needs seven months. It seems mighty suspicious that Arum is using this as a yet another excuse to keep Mayweather from fighting his No.1 moneymaker Pacquiao.

Arum told ESPN writer Rafael “I want to make sure Manny’s cuts are healed. We won’t fall under this kind of pressure. June is more likely for Manny’s fight, not May. I don’t even know if Mayweather will be licensed before he serves his time.”

Does that seem like someone who wants to make a fight? Arum appears to be just grabbing any excuse just to keep Pacquiao away from Mayweather.