By Chris Williams: With each passing day, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that Filipino star Manny Pacquiao and his 84-year-old promoter Bob Arum made a major blunder in selecting Tim Bradley for his next fight on April 9 on HBO PPV. Despite the comments Arum made recently about there being a great deal of interest in the Pacquiao-Bradley 3 fight, I don’t see the interest being there in this fight in the internet.
It wouldn’t be a big deal normally if the Pacquiao-Bradley 3 fight was a fail, because Arum already had Pacquiao in two poor fights against Chris Algieri and Brandon Rios that failed to bring in a lot of PPV buys.
However, with Pacquiao running for a seat in the senate in the Philippines in May, it was very important that Pacquiao to take some risks in his next fight by facing someone that he hadn’t fought before and someone that had an actual good chance of beating him.
Even if you think that Bradley had a chance of beating Pacquiao in this fight, the fact of the matter is Pacquiao got the better of Bradley in their two previous fights. Those are the fights that the fans are going to focus on when they decide whether they want to pay $70 to see the third Pacquiao-Bradley fight.
You’ve got to think of the fight as a movie. If you’d already seen two of the movies in a three-movie series and they both were horrible, I don’t think you’re going to be too excited about seeing a third movie in the series, especially if it’s selling at the full price and not heavily discounted to a fraction of the original two movie prices for tickets.
With the way things have been going wrong for Pacquiao recently both in and outside of the ring, the only way he can turn things around is for him to continue fighting and start taking HUGE risks with his career. That means he needs to stop fighting Bradley all the time, and forget about easy marks like Chris Algieri and Brandon Rios. Pacquiao needs to take charge of his match-making and start being the one that selects his opponents rather than his promoter.
If Pacquiao doesn’t get the senate seat that he so badly wants, then he might need to consider sticking around and fighting longer so that he can get popular enough to win the senate seat in the elections next year or whenever the next elections take place after 2016. Pacquiao should do things the right way before his next attempt to win a seat in office. He needs to start fighting some quality fighters outside of Arum’s Top Rank stable if he’s not interested in fighting Terence Crawford.
Arum needs to reach out to the other promoters and try and get Pacquiao some fights against some top names. If Pacquiao really wants to win a seat in the senate in the Philippines, then the best way he can achieve that would be for him to take some risky fights against the likes of Saul “Canelo” Alvarez, Keith Thurman, Shawn Porter, Gennady Golovkin, Amir Khan, Adrien Broner or Daniel Jacobs. If he gets knocked around and knocked out by those fighters, then so be it. I’m sure that the voters in the Philippines will respect him just the same.
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