By Chris Williams: Trainer Freddie Roach has his doubts about whether there is enough time left before May 5th to negotiate a mega fight between his fighter Manny Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather Jr. and then properly promote the bout.
Roach thinks it’s pushing it to have a fight that soon with all the things that would need to be done.
Mayweather wants the fight to take place on May 5th, and has already booked the MGM Grand arena in Las Vegas, Nevada for the fight. However, Roach doesn’t know if it’s a doable situation, telling USAtoday.com, “I don’t know about the time period. I don’t know if there is enough time to promote it correctly….We’ve been chasing this guy for two years.”
Well, it’s still January and that gives Roach and Bob Arum four months to promote the fight and get Pacquiao ready. If that’s not enough, then how did Arum do a rush job with the Antonio Margarito fight? He had to shop states just to get Margarito licensed because he had lost it due to the handwrap scandal.
If Arum was willing to go through all the trouble to find a state to license Margarito, then he shouldn’t have any problems with working quickly to put together a huge fight with Mayweather. The thing is Roach makes it seem it’s no big deal to put the fight off for another 10 months but believe me something else will pop up then as well, and we’ll likely have similar complaints from Roach and/or Arum why a fight can’t be made.
It’s funny that Roach says that they’ve been chasing Mayweather for two years. They had the chance to fight Mayweather in 2010, but Pacquiao wanted a 24 day cut off period for the random drug tests for performance enhancing drugs. Who’s fault was that the fight didn’t get made? That’s kind of unheard of for someone to be asking for a large test free period like that before a fight. The fight could have been made right then and there had there been some give on Pacquiao’s part.
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