Pacquiao’s deadline for Mayweather down to 6 days

By Boxing News - 01/25/2015 - Comments

pac777By Chris Williams: Manny Pacquiao’s unilateral deadline for Floyd Mayweather Jr to agree to the contract and sign off on it will end next Saturday, on January 31st.

That’s only six days from now, and with all the issues that still have yet to be resolved in the contract such as the Showtime vs HBO negotiations, it doesn’t look like the Pacquiao-Mayweather fight will take place next.

There’s still a possibility that the fight can take place later in the year in September if Pacquiao is interested in trying to face Mayweather again, but the fight looks dead in the water for May.

Pacquiao’s deadline for the end of January pretty much spoiled things because the negotiations obviously need more time, and for him to have made the decision to draw a line in the sand and give a hard deadline with still so much to decided, it reeks of poor decision making for the Filipino fighter.

Impatient people tend to undermine themselves by wanting things to be easy, and when they’re not, they give in and take the easy route. I think we’re seeing that with Pacquiao.

The easy route will be him pulling out of the negotiations and then facing one of his promoter Bob Arum’s Top Rank stable fighters like Jessie Vargas next. The money that Pacquiao will get for the Vargas or for any of the plan-B options Arum has for him will be just a fraction of the kind of cash that he’d have gotten if he’d been patient and not created a deadline.

Like I said, many people want the easy thing. They don’t want to work hard for things, stay patient and be disciplined. When Pacquiao pulls out of the negotiations after next Saturday, he’ll get the easy thing by being matched up against one of Arum’s plan-B options, but he won’t get the fame and definitely not the kind of money he would have gotten for the Mayweather fight.

If and when the Mayweather-Pacquiao negotiations resume later this year for a possible September fight, we can only hope that Pacquiao doesn’t set another deadline in looking to rush through the negotiations instead of staying patient and working hard for the fight.

If Pacquiao takes the easy way again by pulling out of the negotiations and then getting stuck fighting one of Arum’s stable fighters, he’ll get the same results with a fight that will make far less money.

The Mayweather-Pacquiao fight can’t be made until HBO and Showtime agree to their side of the negotiations, and we may not see that happen this time around. Mayweather only has two fights left on his contract with Showtime, and it’s quite possible that HBO will wait that contract out and look to sign Mayweather in 2016, as pointed out by Mlive.com.

Once Mayweather is no longer with Showtime, there won’t be anything blocking the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight from taking place in terms of the Showtime vs. HBO negotiations. It would be all HBO. Of course, Showtime can always give Mayweather a big contract extension if they can come up with more money than HBO can.



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