By Chris Williams: WBO welterweight champion Tim Bradley (29-0, 12 KO’s) feels he’s someone that Manny Pacquiao has to fight again because of him losing to Bradley last June in a 12 round decision loss. Bradley feels he’s the most appealing opponent of the three guys picked out for Pacquiao by his promoter Bob Arum.

Bradley told the Los Angeles Times “I don’t know how he can pick anyone other than me. If he wants his belt back, he has to come through me to get it…I’ve got a win on my resume over Manny Pacquiao, and it’s going in the history books that way.”

I think it’s reasonable that Pacquiao should fight Bradley again to at least try and get his WBO strap back, but that’s not how Pacquiao’s promoter Bob Arum sees this. He sees things in dollars and cents, and he obviously was disappointed with the amount of loot that the Pacquiao-Bradley fight was able to net last June. The figures that I’ve been hearing are 700,000 pay per view buys, which are way below the numbers that Pacquiao has picked up in his fights with Juan Manuel Marquez and Miguel Cotto recently.

I think if it was a little bit of a difference in terms of cash, Arum probably wouldn’t mind, but this is a huge amount of money that he and Pacquiao couldn’t rake in for the Bradley fight. I don’t think Arum wants to risk another smaller payday by letting his cash cow Pacquiao fight Bradley again and it not hauling in big cash. Arum wants to maximize the cash that his fighter brings in and if he puts him back in with Bradley, he might end up having to settle for less.

In hindsight, Arum probably made a huge mistake of signing Bradley to his Top Rank stable to begin with because he wasn’t a star and there were huge question marks whether he had the fighting style needed to ever become a big name. Arum still went ahead and signed Bradley up, and then rushed him into a fight with Pacquiao after only one fight under his belt with his Top Rank stable.

Arum usually builds up a fighter slowly over many years when he’s trying create a star, but with Bradley he didn’t take his time like normally does and just threw him in with Pacquiao. Of course, the fight wasn’t going to do well because he rushed it. And the worse thing that came from all this was that Pacquiao got beat and exposed by Bradley. All it took was a little movement by Bradley and a consistent work rate and he beat the Filipino. You think Arum wants to risk having that happen again? No way. Bradley is all wrong for Pacquiao, and I think Arum is going to gently but firmly steer his little cash cow away from Bradley to bigger money fights against Marquez or Cotto.