By Dan Ambrose: Of the two fighters – Manny Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather Jr – involved in the negotiations for their fight on May 2nd, Pacquiao is the one who will likely be hurt the most if the negotiations extends into March. Pacquiao is used to training for eight weeks to get ready for his fights.
He’s not going to be able to do that if the negotiations last into March. Pacquiao will have to make due to possibly 6 or even 5 weeks of training, depending on how long the negotiation talks go.
You would have to think this would favor Mayweather, because he’s someone who doesn’t need a great deal of time to get ready for his fights, and he’s at a point in his career where he knows his body well and what it takes for him to get ready for his fights.
“I need eight weeks. That window is getting smaller and smaller,” Roach said via Radio Raheem earlier on Wednesday.
Mayweather is fully in command of the situation right now, because he knows whether he wants to fight Pacquiao or not. If Mayweather is interested in stringing this out in order to throw Pacquiao and his promoter Bob Arum off, then he can switch things up in March and choose someone like Miguel Cotto for him to fight. Before Mayweather does that, he’ll likely have been training for Cotto’s style of fighting.
I don’t see Mayweather doing this, because he clearly wants the Pacquiao fight. But if he does choose to string this out into March, he can either give Pacquiao little time to train by signing the contract for the fight late, or he can choose to fight someone else.
That person would then find himself in a situation where they would have little time to train for the fight. If they wanted the Mayweather fight, they’d have to agree to fight him on May 2nd. The lack of training time would be the caveat.
If Mayweather announces the Pacquiao fight before the end of February, it’ll leave Pacquiao with enough time to train for the full eight weeks, as long as Mayweather doesn’t insist on both fighters having a long press tour to market the fight. Pacquiao obviously won’t be able to refuse going on the tour, because after all it’ll help make him more money in terms of pay-per-view sales for the fight.
There’s still plenty of time left for Mayweather to announce the fight depending on what he want to do as far as a press tour. If he doesn’t really feel like a press tour is necessary, then there’s nothing magical about him announcing the fight before March. He could wait that long without it hurting the fight if he chooses to. Once Mayweather does announce the fight, the interest from both casual and hardcore boxing fans will be extreme.
Fans will want to see this fight, and Mayweather and Pacquiao won’t need to do much to get them to purchase it on PPV.
If Mayweather and Pacquiao were hoping to announce the fight on a special date, they missed it by not announcing it during the Super Bowl. That would have been a golden opportunity to announce the fight.
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