By Chris Williams: Trainer Freddie Roach hasn’t given up on the idea of his fighter WBO welterweight champion Manny Pacquiao fighting 40-year-old Juan Manuel Marquez for a fifth time this coming November.
Roach is like a dog that won’t let go of a bone, he badly wants the aging Marquez to agree to another fight with Pacquiao for some reason. It obviously must still bug Roach how Marquez knocked Pacquiao down twice in their last two years ago and left him face down on the canvas sawing logs.
“I think he’ll [Marquez] come to the table sooner or later,” Roach said to theboxingvoice.com.
I hope Roach isn’t holding his breath waiting for Marquez to come to the table and accept a small slice of the pie instead of taking half of it.
Roach, Pacquiao and his promoter Bob Arum are in a situation now here they honestly don’t have a lot of options for the 35-year-old Pacquiao’s next fight on November 22nd. They can’t trot out Tim Bradley again, because they just used him for their last fight in April and he was beaten decisively.
They’re going to have to wait at least 2 more fights to bring Bradley out again for yet another fight. Danny Garcia, a name that Roach has been talking about wanting for Pacquiao, can’t take the fight because he’s with Al Haymon. Roach doesn’t Amir Khan, so he’s out. Ruslan Provodnikov was just beaten by Chris Algieri, so he’s out as well. While Arum is interested in matching Pacquiao and Algieri up together, Pacquiao’s other team members aren’t excited about that fight. Algieri probably won’t get the fight based on that. Saul “Canelo” Alvarez fights on Showtime, so he’s out of the picture for Pacquiao, even though Oscar De La Hoya of Golden Boy Promotions would love to put a fight together between Canelo and Pacquiao. Besides that, Canelo is probably going to get beaten by Erislandy Lara next month.
Roach would probably never agree to let Pacquiao fight Lara. He doesn’t want Miguel Cotto to fight Lara, even if he dominates Canelo in their fight on July 12th. He wants Canelo, but not the Mayweather-like Lara for Cotto. I guess there’s too much Mayweather in Lara, and Roach, being a wise old trainer, he probably knows what Lara would do to Cotto, as well as Pacquiao.
I don’t think Marquez is going to “come to the table” for a Pacquiao 5th fight unless they give him a straight 50-50 purse split of the cash. The money that Marquez brings in with pay-per-view sales is just too much for him to accept another smaller cut like the ones he’s been receiving for his fights with Pacquiao.
The reality is that Pacquiao doesn’t have a lot of good options right now. He can fight Marquez and give him the $20 million that he wants, or he can face Algieri and be satisfied with a fight that may bring in just 500,000 PPV buys or less. Pacquiao can also fight one of Arum’s Top Rank stable fighters like Brandon Rios or Jessie Vargas, but we’re talking horrible PPV numbers with those two. If Arum wanted to be adventurous, he could drag super featherweight champion Mikey Garcia or lightweight champion Terence Crawford up to 140 so that they could fight Pacquiao, but we’re still talking low PPV numbers. Let’s face it; the only guy that brings in that good cash for Pacquiao is Marquez, but he wants a 50-50 deal due to the huge amount of fans he brings into the fights.
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