By Chris Williams: World Boxing Council (WBC) president Jose Sulaiman says he’ll lend his weight to try and exert pressure to get the mega fight between Manny Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather Jr. made.
Sulaiman claims to be a close friend of Mayweather’s and he’ll try and speak with him to get the two fighters to finally agree to fight after two years of wasted opportunities to make the fight happen.
Sulaiman said to the Manila Standard “Take it for sure that I will do my best as this is the too fight the world wants to see. [Mayweather] respects the organization and is a close friend. So are some of his representatives.”
This sounds like a pipe dream to me for Sulaiman. I know Mayweather Jr. currently holds down the WBC welterweight trap, but he’s not going to likely care one bit if Sulaiman starts applying the pressure to get him to take the Pacquiao fight.
What it comes down to is money and drug testing. If Pacquiao is willing to take a smaller cut, say between 30 to 40% of the financial pie, and he’s willing to agree to random blood tests to check for performance enhancing drugs all the way to the day before the fight, then I see no problem in the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight getting made. But in the absence of that, Mayweather isn’t going to give charity to the Filipino by giving him a 50-50 deal when he just got beat by Tim Bradley, and he failed to bring in the kind of big money that Mayweather Jr. did in his win over Miguel Cotto.
Pacquiao losing to Bradley pretty much sunk his ship and removed any chance he ever had of getting a 50-50 deal. But once Pacquiao’s PPV numbers are released for the Bradley fight, if they ever are by his promoter Bob Arum, then he’ll likely never get a 50-50 deal. The reason so is because Pacquiao’s fight with Bradley may not even have broken 900,000 buys. Can you imagine Pacquiao, with only 800,000 buys or less, coming to the bargaining table with Mayweather, with his 1.5 million buys from the Cotto fight. We’re talking double the numbers here. Pacquiao can’t get a 50-50 deal under those conditions.
The Filipino should just accept the 30 percent that’s offered to him by Mayweather and be happy he’s getting even that.
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