By Chris Williams: Top Rank promoter Bob Arum will be making an announcement this Friday on his 84th birthday about who his No.1 money fighter Manny Pacquiao (57-6-2, 38 KOs) will be facing for his final fight of his career on April 9th at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Arum will be making the announcement during the broadcast of his truTV fight card from the Coliseo Roberto Clemente, San Juan, Puerto Rico. WBO welterweight champion Tim Bradley (33-1-1, 13 KOs) is expected to be the guy that Arum announces as Pacquiao’s opponent. If Bradley doesn’t get announced as the guy for Pacquiao then it’ll be a huge insult to him.
Bradley, 33, is working as a broadcaster for the card. If Arum makes an announcement that Pacquiao will be fighting Amir Khan (31-3, 19 KO) or Arum’s fighter WBO light welterweight champion Terence Crawford (27-0, 19 KO), then it would be a huge slap in the face to Bradley. I guess he wouldn’t be able to do anything about it, because he would still be under contract with Top Rank for the duration of contract with them.
Bradley recently re-upped with Top Rank. If he’s going to sulk about the way that Arum chose to announce Pacquiao’s next fight, then it won’t help him any, because it’s not as if he’ll be able to get out of the contract. It also won’t help Bradley if he becomes passive-aggressive by not putting forth the best effort he can in his fights afterwards, because it’s his own career that he would be messing up by doing so.
That’s why I can’t see Arum announcing anyone other than Bradley as Pacquiao’s next opponent, even though Crawford is said to be coming to the fight to watch it live. But if Crawford is coming to the fight, then there’s probably a chance that he could get named as well. I can’t see Crawford coming to that fight unless he felt that he had an opportunity to be named by Arum as the guy that Pacquiao fights next.
The difference is that Crawford is volunteering to come to the Donaire-Juarez fight on his own accord. He’s not someone who is working the fight as a broadcaster like Bradley. For Arum to pick out a fight where Bradley is the broadcaster to name someone other than him as Pacquiao’s next opponent would come off as an extremely callous thing for Arum to do. It would burn a serious bridge with me if Arum chose that move to announce Pacquiao’s next fight if I were Bradley, especially if I recently re-upped with Top Rank the way that Bradley did.
“That’s what we are going to do,” Arum said to ESPN.com about him announcing the fight during the Nonito Donaire vs. Cesar Juarez truTV fight card this Friday, on December 11th. “I don’t know but if it does, you won’t hear it from my lips,” Arum said about him not leaking the name of Pacquiao’s next opponent before his announcement.
Bradley vs. Pacquiao would be the equivalent of Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Andre Berto. In other words, it’s a decent fight for the boxing fans, and a fight that Pacquiao would have a great chance of winning. But it also would be a fight that not too many boxing fans will want to pay to see on HBO PPV.
If Pacquiao is really the one that selected his next opponent and not Arum, then it looks like he might be playing it safe by opting to fight Bradley instead of Crawford, who is seen as the more difficult fight due to his counter punching style of fighting. Crawford doesn’t have the skills to beat a fighter like Pacquiao in a brawling type of fight.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWH4-bjrcxc
What you see with Crawford is him being tactical, jabbing, throwing left hooks, changing stances and holding. Crawford is difficult to fight because he doesn’t just fight in one style. In his fight against Raymundo Beltran, he realized that he couldn’t punch with the guy, so he did a lot of holding after every shot he would throw in order to keep Beltran from hitting him back. It was very boring to watch, but it was effective for Crawford because the referee didn’t do anything to police his holding. Crawford vs. Pacquiao would be potentially a very boring fight to watch because Crawford would never brawl with Pacquiao. There’s no way Crawford would do that, because he’s not skilled like that.
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