By Allan Fox: The odds of the 36-year-old Manny Pacquiao getting a rematch with Floyd Mayweather Jr. in the future took a nosedive this Monday with the news of Pacquiao needing shoulder surgery on his right rotator cuff to repair a “significant tear.”
The surgery is expected to keep Pacquiao out of the ring for 9-12 months, which means he likely won’t be back inside the ring until early 2016. Mayweather has already said that his last fight of his career will be this September. After that he’ll be retiring from the sport.
Unless Pacquiao’s promoters at Top Rank are able to lure Mayweather back into the ring next year for a rematch against Pacquiao, we’ve probably won’t be seeing them fight ever again. What could determine whether a rematch between Mayweather and Pacquiao is how eager Top Rank is in seeing the two face each other again?
If Bob Arum, Pacquiao’s promoter, offers Mayweather a huge deal for them to get back inside the ring for a rematch, he might be receptive to coming back for another fight against the Filipino star. It would probably take a split of 70-30 in Mayweather’s favor for him to have any interest in fighting Pacquiao again because the 60-40 deal won’t likely work again, not with the way that Pacquiao was schooled by Mayweather. That deal was under the old conditions for the fight with Pacquiao having won his last three fights against Brandon Rios, Tim Bradley and Chris Algieri. But with Pacquiao having been beaten convincingly by Mayweather last Saturday night, you would have to expect that to remove any possibility for another 60-40 deal.
Pacquiao’s options for big fights are pretty thin when he does return to the ring next year. Arum doesn’t work with adviser Al Haymon, so a lot of interesting fights between Haymon’s fighters and Pacquiao are pretty much impossible. That means about the best fans can hope for is to see Pacquiao fighting the likes of Ruslan Provodnikov, Rios, Bradley or Terence Crawford. Those are decent fights, but hardly huge ones. Provodnikov was just beaten, and Pacquiao already beat Rios and Bradley. Crawford still lacks the popularity to make a fight between him and Pacquiao a big deal. Crawford is guy that is popular in a region, but not nationally in the U.S. Outside of a rematch against Mayweather, the only fighters that Pacquiao can face that will bring him and his promoters at Top Rank a lot of PPV buys are guys like Saul “Canelo” Alvarez and Miguel Cotto. The other names won’t bring in much. Amir Khan is a possibility, but he’s with Al Haymon so that makes it unlikely that Pacquiao will ever face Khan.
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