By Chris Williams: Bob Arum of Top Rank thought it would be a great idea to have his number #1 money fighter Manny Pacquiao fight in Macao, China against Brandon Rios in a way to help open the Chinese markets while at the same time saving Pacquiao from having to pay the high taxes from the U.S. Unfortunately, it looks like the idea was a total fail with the Pacquiao-Rios fight card drawing in the neighborhood of just 475,000 pay-per-view buys and grossing $30 million.
Just for comparisons sake, the recent Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Saul “Canelo” Alvarez fight in Las Vegas, Nevada, drew 2.2 million PPV buys and grossed $150 million. As you can see, staging the Pacquiao-Rios fight in Macao seems to have been a huge blunder. With Pacquiao’s guaranteed purse of $18 million for the Rios fight, you have to wonder how much of a profit the card made.
Without saying why, Arum has quickly announced that Pacquiao’s next fight will be staged in the United States on April 12th at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada. It seems pretty obvious why. It’s too risky to have Pacquiao fighting outside of the U.S if it means that his PPV totals are going to take a massive hit. I think the Pacquiao-Rios fight would have done poor PPV numbers even if they had staged it in U.S, because it was a bad choice of an opponent for him. Picking Rios, a fighter that had lost his last fight and had a highly questionable win over Richard Abril last year, was just a very dumb move on Arum and Pacquiao’s part. Pacquiao blessed Rios as his opponent when he should have been turning him down on the spot because that was a really poor choice.
Pacquiao might be at the point of his career where he needs to be fighting top guys that are popular or have a chance to actually beat him. I don’t see any popular fighters in Arum’s stable, so Pacquiao should think seriously about saying no to Arum if he offers him a Tim Bradley or Ruslan Provodnikov fight. The only real option Pacquiao has from Arum’s stable is Juan Manuel Marquez, but he’s no longer interested in fighting him.
Pacquiao needs to tell Arum he wants to fight some of Golden Boy Promotions’ fighters like Canelo, Danny Garcia, Adrien Broner or Keith Thurman next. Those are arguably much better options for Pacquiao then for Arum to trot out Bradley again or put him in with his former sparring partner Provodnikov.
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