By Chris Williams: Earlier on Monday, there were reports from AP that a candidate in the May 9 Philippines election wanted to have Manny Pacquiao’s April 9 fight against Tim Bradley (33-1-1, 13 KOs) be postponed until after the election because Pacquiao is one of the 48 candidates running for a seat in the senate in that election.
The opponent feels that Pacquiao will gain an unfair advantage over the other candidates due to his fight with Bradley bringing him a lot of publicity in the Philippines. Top Rank promoter Bob Arum says there is no chance that Pacquiao’s fight will be postponed.
Arum says he’s checked it out really well and there’s no way that the fight will be postponed. Arum says that Pacquiao needs to make sure he watches what he says during the build up to his fight against Bradley and doesn’t bring up the fact that he’s running for office.
In other words, Pacquiao can’t be campaigning during his preparation for his fight against Bradley. This gives advantage to Pacquiao’s opponents, because while he’s busy getting ready for his fight against Bradley On HBO PPV, his opponents are free to campaign all around the Philippines.
“There’s no chance the (election) commission will force him to postpone the fight. Our attorneys looked into this very carefully before we made the fight (with Bradley) and there was nothing there to suggest Manny’s fighting constitutes a conflict of interest in terms of campaigning,” Arum said to the reviewjournal. The rule is plain — you can’t publicize that you’re running for office,” Arum said. “We’re not going to be holding any (political) rallies for Manny while he’s here in the States preparing to fight Bradley.”
It actually might be better if Pacquiao did postpone his fight against Bradley, because all the negative publicity that Pacquiao received over his recent comments about gays obviously hasn’t helped matters. However, I don’t think it matters how long Pacquiao were to postpone the Bradley fight. I think the fans still wouldn’t be super excited about this match-up because they’ve already seen him and Bradley fight twice before. There’s suspense involved in this fight. The fans know that Bradley can’t punch and has no chance of knocking Pacquiao out. They also know that Pacquiao has already beaten Bradley twice before, but was ripped off in thier first fight.
It’s too bad that Arum chose to match Pacquiao against one of his Top Rank stable fighters instead of putting him in with someone different and someone outside of his Top Rank stable. There would some good fights that Arum should have tried making for Pacquiao instead of going back to Bradley for yet another fight.
It’s good for Bradley that he’s getting another payday against Pacquiao, because he’s getting wealthy with these fights. But it’s boxing fans because the outcome is already pretty much known. Pacquiao will beat Bradley again by another 12 round decision. I wouldn’t be surprised if Bradley winds up with another calf or ankle injury while running around the ring trying not to get hit by Pacquiao.
Arum could increase the pay-per-view buys for the Pacquiao-Bradley fight if he reduced the price from $70 to $5. I think that’s good price for it, because I actually thinks it’s not worth watching. But if Arum dropped the price to $4.99, I think a lot of people would be willing to pay to see the Pacquiao vs. Bradley 3 fight.
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