By Chris Williams: Floyd Mayweather Jr doesn’t agree with Manny Pacquiao’s promoter Bob Arum that the Cinco de Mayo holiday on May 2nd should be for Mexican fighters like Saul “Canelo” Alvarez.
Mayweather feels that anyone has the right to fight on those dates. He points he’s got Mexican fans and he should be allowed to fight on one of Mexican holidays like he’s been doing recently.
“When I hear Cinco de Mayo is just for the Mexicans, the last time I checked any holiday is for anyone,” Mayweather said to Fighthype.com.
You can’t argue with Mayweather about that. There’s no laws in America that state that non-Mexican fighters can’t fight on Mexican holidays. If Mayweather wants to fight on the Mexican holidays in May and September, then he has the right to do that.
Mayweather says Miguel Cotto, the fighter that Arum is trying to match up against Canelo on Cinco de Mayo, isn’t Mexican. He’s Puerto Rican. Mayweather thinks that they should take the fight to Mexican in order to honor the holiday.
The real question is will Arum choose to block the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight on May 2nd for a smaller fighter between Cotto and Canelo. That’s the major question. If Arum does this then he’ll be potentially losing out on a ton of money because we’re talking about two different level of fights here.
Cotto-Canelo, as nice of a fight as it is, will probably do little more than 1 million pay-per-view buys under the best of circumstances. We’re talking about two fighters who have never proven to be able to sell more than 300,000+ pay-per-view buys when they were the A-side in a PPV card.
When you match them together, you might get a little over 1 million PPV buys. In comparison, a Mayweather-Pacquiao fight could do 3 million buys. Would Arum be willing to lose out on the much bigger fight for the smaller one? It’s hard to believe he would sacrifice the bigger fight for the smaller fight, but it’s possible.
“I beat both [Cotto and Canelo,” Mayweather said.
It’s not just that Mayweather beat both Cotto and Canelo, he also brings in many more pay-per-view buys than either of them as an A-side fighter. That’s the thing that you have to focus on. If you’re to pick which fight would do the better numbers on Cinco de Mayo, Mayweather vs. Pacquiao comes out way, way ahead of the Cotto-Canelo fight.
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