De La Hoya: Bradley vs. Mayweather Jr. will never happen

By Boxing News - 01/27/2013 - Comments

delahoya2By Chris Williams: Oscar De La Hoya of Golden Boy Promotions ruled out Top Rank fighter WBO welterweight champion Tim Bradley as one of the candidates for Floyd Mayweather Jr’s next fight on May 4th, and he also doesn’t see them ever fighting.

De La Hoya said to the thaboxingvoice.com when asked if Bradley would fight Mayweather next, “No, never, that’s not even a possibility. If you look at their [Top Rank] roster of who they have, who is Tim Bradley going to fight? What do they have to keep telling him, a bunch of lies? It’s not fair to the fighter.”

I never really expected Bradley to be seriously considered as one of the candidates for Mayweather’s May 4th date, but De La Hoya is ruling Bradley out as a future opponent for Mayweather altogether by saying “Never.” De La Hoya probably knows Mayweather more than a lot of people about who he’d be willing or not willing to fight.

Mayweather might be interested in fighting Bradley if he wasn’t one of Arum’s Top Rank stable fighters. That right there might be enough for Mayweather to permanently ignore Bradley unless he leaves Top Rank and goes with a different promoter.

De La Hoya doesn’t see many options for Bradley at Top Rank. De La Hoya doesn’t see much in Arum’s stable for Bradley to fight. However, Bradley already got a big money fight against Manny Pacquiao, so he at least has that going for him. If Arum lets Bradley get a second shot at Manny, then Bradley won’t need to fight any of the other top welterweights because he’ll make enough money on that fight to live very comfortably for the rest of his life.

I would normally say that a chance of Bradley getting another crack at Pacquiao isn’t very good, but with Arum’s stable being pretty thin around the 140 to 147 pound area, it’s likely that Arum will put Bradley back in with Pacquiao if for no other reason because he doesn’t have many other options for his in house fights. There’s Brandon Rios and Bradley, and both of them are likely to get a shot at Pacquiao in 2014 unless Arum keeps matching Pacquiao against Juan Manuel Marquez over and over again until the boxing public get sick of it or one of them gets seriously hurt.



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