Ariza thinks Arum doesn’t want Mayweather-Pacquiao fight

By Boxing News - 01/14/2015 - Comments

pac53By Chris Williams: Strength and conditioning trainer Alex Ariza doesn’t trust Manny Pacquiao’s promoter Bob Arum of Top Rank, and he feels that the 83-year-old is going to pull a fast one by not having the mega-fight between his money man Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather Jr take place.

Arum will then turn around and blame Mayweather for the fight not taking place. Ariza doesn’t say why he thinks Arum won’t let the 36-year-old Pacquiao fight Mayweather, but you can guess that it might have something to do with the hit that Pacquiao will take in the pay-per-view numbers if he gets schooled by Mayweather.

“I think it’s all an illusion. Even though Floyd’s the only one who’s ever made an offer, at the end of the day, they’re still going to blame Floyd if the fight doesn’t happen,” Ariza said via Fighthype.com. “I think Bob is going to make everybody believe that the fight is going to happen and then he’s going to Charlie Brown us; he’s going to pull the football away and then blame it on Floyd,” Ariza said.

I wouldn’t be surprised if that happened. I still remember how Mayweather ended up the scapegoat for the first negotiations between him and Pacquiao not working out. Instead of Pacquiao getting the blame for not agreeing to the full testing that Mayweather wanted for performance enhancing drugs, Mayweather got blamed for it. Then when they attempted to negotiate a second time three years later, Arum was talking about a stadium needing to be built and how Pacquiao still had a cut that wasn’t healed.

All these years some boxing fans have been under the illusion that Pacquiao is the best fighter in the welterweight division, even better than Mayweather. This likely has led to a lot of fans eagerly purchasing Pacquiao’s many mismatches against hapless opposition like Brandon Rios, Antonio Margarito, Shane Mosley, and Chris Algieri to name a small handful. But if Mayweather schools Pacquiao, then the fans will see that Pacquiao was never in Mayweather’s class, and this could lead to Pacquiao’s PPV numbers dropping off dramatically.

In other words, if Pacquiao loses to badly to Mayweather, we could see the gravy train come to screeching halt to where Pacquiao’s pay-per-view numbers drop below even 300,000 buys. Once he’s in the 100,000 to 200,000 range, then I believe he’ll bring them back up again to where they were previously. Even if he fought every one of Arum’s Top Rank stable fighters multiple times and won, I don’t see Pacquiao being able to live down his loss to Mayweather.



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