By Chris Williams: According to Manny Pacquiao’s end of the month deadline given to Floyd Mayweather Jr this week, Floyd has only 11 more days to sign the contract for their proposed fight on May 2nd. Instead of letting his promoter Bob Arum handle the process, Pacquiao said to the Los Angeles Times that Mayweather has until the end of the month before Pacquiao will move on.
This now puts pressure on Mayweather to hurry his way through a process that should normally take time so that he, his adviser Al Haymon, and Showtime and HBO can work out a deal.
It’s unclear what Arum has to think about Pacquiao talking deadlines for the Mayweather negotiations, but it’s probably not the wisest thing for Pacquiao to be telling Mayweather that he has to make a decision in just 11 days. Even if Pacquiao was on the same level as Mayweather in terms of popularity and pay-per-view sales, you want to have the experts doing the negotiating, not the fighters.
You want people who can use finesse in negotiating, and not the fighters giving ultimatums. Deadlines are a sure fire way to kill negotiations. Look what happened with the Miguel Cotto vs. Saul “Canelo” Alvarez fight negotiations, which went belly up after Canelo and Golden Boy Promotions kept setting deadlines to Cotto instead of being patient and working through the negotiations slowly without getting frustrated.
“My promoter and I, we’ve already agreed to the terms and conditions of whatever he wants,” Pacquiao said to the latimes.com. “We’re just waiting on the signed contract from him. That’s the hard part – if they will fight or not. We have to know soon, because if they will not fight, we can move on and choose another opponent. We have a deadline … this month.”
If Pacquiao is going to be setting deadlines for his opponents like Mayweather, he’s not helping the process. If Pacquiao really wants the Mayweather fight like he always talks about, then why is he all of a sudden setting deadlines for a process that needs to be taken slowly? That just shows that he’s too impatient, and wants it to be easy. Nothing is easy when it’s something that is important.
If Pacquiao wants easy then he needs to tell Arum to go get Brandon Rios again so that the boxing fans can see another mismatch. Pacquiao is the one that has talked endlessly about wanting to fight Mayweather. Now that he’s on the verge of getting the fight, he goes potentially blows it by giving Mayweather a deadline.
What’s the rush? Is Pacquiao in a hurry to fight Top Rank stable fighter Jessie Vargas?
I see this as another bad business decision by Pacquiao. He should have stuck it out with the negotiations six years ago when him and Mayweather were looking to fight each other in 2009. Instead, Pacquiao and Arum moved on and fought Joshua Clottey. They had a 50-50 deal for the Mayweather fight at the time, and likely would have made close to $100 million.
Pacquiao perhaps made one-sixth of that total in his fight against Joshua Clottey. It just wasn’t a smart move. And now we seem to be on the verge of seeing another blow it move by Pacquiao with him giving Mayweather, the A-side fighter, a deadline. For what? Where is Pacquiao going to go if he doesn’t get the Mayweather fight?
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