By Chris Williams: We all know already how Top Rank promoter Bob Arum is a highly successful promoter with a degree from Harvard and how he’s made millions upon millions of dollars in the fight business. However, that doesn’t mean that Arum doesn’t make mistakes as we saw with him letting the Juan Manuel Lopez vs. Yuriorkis Gamboa match-up marinate too long and missing out on making that fight after Lopez finally got beat by someone else.
Now I see Arum making another mistake by matching his money fighter Manny Pacquiao up against weak opposition so that he doesn’t get beat again and miss out on the payday bout against Floyd Mayweather Jr. This isn’t just Pacquiao that would be missing the Mayweather fight and the money that comes with it if the Filipino loses again, but also Arum as well. He won’t be able to get the good cash that he can get now if Pacquiao loses to one of Arum’s gang of three – Tim Bradley, Juan Manuel Marquez and Miguel Cotto – that he has picked out for Pacquiao to choose from for his next fight on November 10th or December 1st.
Those guys are way too dangerous for Pacquiao at this advanced stage of his career. You know things are looking bad for him because he lost his last fight to Bradley and should have lost his fight before that against Marquez last November. Age is setting in fast with this one it seems. This is why Arum needs to take things really slow with him. When you’ve got an old fighter and the potential for a HUGE payday, you don’t take the older timer and throw him in with young lions that have a good chance of eating him up. What you do is find someone a little lame and stun him and throw him in the ring so that your old fighter can win. This is what Arum should be doing with Pacquiao to help preserve him and the Mayweather fight. Pacquiao really needs to be preserved like a deep freeze.
Here’s who I would put Pacquiao in with for his next fight:
Jan Zaveck
Selcuk Aydin
Robert Guerrero
Carlos Quintana
Paulie Malignaggi
Vyacheslav Senchnko
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