By Chris Williams: In an interview on ESPN earlier Thursday, Manny Pacquiao said he’d be willing to give Floyd Mayweather Jr. a 55/45 split of the purse just to make the fight happen along with full drug testing for performance enhancing drugs.
Pacquiao said this as quoted by fighthype.com “I’m waiting for that fight [Mayweather] to happen…It’s okay for me if he gets the higher percentage than me…I told him [Mayweather] that I agree with 45 and 55. No problem [full drug testing]. Whatever he wants. Even the night of the fight, no problem.”
That sounds well and good but what Pacquiao says and his promoter Bob Arum say seem to be two different things. In the recent past, Arum has said that a Mayweather-Pacquiao fight can’t happen unless there’s a 50-50 purse split. Now we’ve got Pacquiao saying he spoke to Mayweather in the past and agreed to a 45/55 split. I don’t know who to believe – Pacquiao or Arum? My thoughts are that Pacquiao can say 45/55 all he wants, but if Arum is sticking to the 50/50 line then the fight won’t get made. Arum is the one that will likely be doing the negotiating with Mayweather, not Pacquiao.
None of this will matter if Pacquiao can’t get past 39-year-old Juan Manuel Marquez on December 8th. Pacquiao has his hands full with that fight, and he could very well get beaten by the Mexican warrior. A lot of boxing fans think Marquez is the better fighter, and it’s disagree with that in watching Pacquiao struggle in his last fight against Tim Bradley.
The last thing that Pacquiao should be doing right now is looking past Marquez towards a fight with Mayweather because Pacquiao has failed to establish that he’s the better fighter than Marquez in three past fights. I know how Pacquiao is talking about coming up with some new strategy that will take him back to his youth of 25, but I don’t believe that’s possible. 25 is gone 2900 yesterdays ago and it’s not coming back. Pacquiao is 33, and not a young 33 either judging by how badly he’s fought against Shane Mosley and Bradley in his last two fights.
When asked if he thought Mayweather was afraid of him, Pacquiao put on a pair of sunglasses and said “I think it’s kind of that.”
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