By Chris Williams: Floyd Mayweather Jr. doesn’t feel the need to fight the Filipino Manny Pacquiao anymore because of how Pacquiao has lost his last two fights in a row. Mayweather feels that those losses has kind of killed the interest in the fight or least the huge interest that there was previously.
Mayweather said to ESPN: “I don’t think the fight holds very much weight anymore. At one possible time, I wanted the fight to happen. I wanted to fight Manny Pacquiao. The only thing I asked was for random blood and urine testing, and I feel like I’m one of the first, I’m a pioneer that talks about urine and blood testing. I never said Manny Pacquiao was using. I only asked for me and him to take random urine and blood testing, and he didn’t want to do it. I don’t know if it will ever happen, but if my legacy was defined off of one fight, then I feel I didn’t have to fight 43 fights. If that’s the case, I could have came into the sport of boxing, fought one fight and gone down as the best fighter that ever lived. If my legacy is defined off of one fight.”
There is still a great deal of interest in a Pacquiao-Mayweather fight, but that interest will likely be extinguished completely if Pacquiao gets beaten again by Juan Manuel Marquez, if they fight this September, and if Pacquiao gets outpointed again by Tim Bradley.
Pacquiao lost to both of those guys in 2012, and he’s going to have to beat them before Mayweather is going to even consider facing him. The interest from boxing fans in a Mayweather-Pacquiao fight will no doubt go up exponentially if Pacquiao can beat Marquez and Bradley, but can he do that? I don’t think so.
I think Marquez pretty much closed the door on Pacquiao last December in stopping him in the 6th round, and he’s not going to bother fighting him again unless Pacquiao’s promoter Bob Arum sweetens the deal considerably from the lopsided 76-24 purse split that Pacquiao enjoyed the last time he fought Marquez.
It’s going to have to be closer to 50-50. Marquez might agree to a 55-45 deal, but I can’t see him agreeing to another lopsided deal in Pacquiao’s favor. And I don’t believe Pacquiao and Arum will agree to give Marquez a nice deal like that, so the fight won’t happen.
If the fight doesn’t happen, then no Mayweather because will have no avenged the Marquez defense. It’s all interconnected. Arum needs to see the big picture when he meets with Marquez to negotiate a fight with Pacquiao, because if that fight doesn’t happen then Arum and Pacquiao won’t get the big bank from a fight against Mayweather.
Comments are closed.