Boxing’s superfight highly unlikely in 2010

Here's a not so good news for Filipino boxing fans out there. The match between Manny Pacquiao vs Floyd Mayweather Jr. won't happen this year.

Boxing’s superfight highly unlikely in 2010
By Kevin Iole

It was three in the morning Saturday on the East Coast when Bob Arum delivered the bad news. The 78-year-old chairman of Top Rank, boxing’s preeminent promotional company, called a news conference in the middle of the night to tell the world that there was no deal for Manny Pacquiao to fight Floyd Mayweather Jr.

Yet.

Sadly, if there is going to be one, it almost certainly won’t be until May 2011. A Top Rank-imposed deadline of 11:59 p.m. Pacific on Friday for Mayweather to accept an offer on the table for a Nov. 13 fight with Pacquiao passed with nary a peep from Mayweather or his representatives.

The deadline, Arum said, was simply the end of an exclusive negotiation period for a Mayweather-Pacquiao fight.

He’ll begin to work later Saturday on reaching a deal for a Pacquiao fight with either Antonio Margarito, the former World Boxing Organization welterweight champion who in 2009 was suspended from boxing for a year by the California State Athletic Commission after getting caught with a plaster-like substance slipped into his hand wraps before a fight with Shane Mosley, or Miguel Cotto.

Neither fight will come anywhere close to creating the kind of sizzle and excitement that a Mayweather-Pacquiao fight would have created. Mayweather and Pacquiao have lapped the field and are the two best fighters and the two biggest stars in the world by a wide margin.

A fight between them could have sold three million pay-per-view purchases and made each man upwards of $60 million.

Pacquiao is going to have to take a significant pay cut to fight either Margarito or Cotto, which he can’t be pleased about. He likely wouldn’t make any more than about a quarter of what he would have made if he were fighting Mayweather, though Arum said on the call that he wouldn’t discuss that until after he speaks with Pacquiao.

The possibility of still doing a Mayweather-Pacquiao fight has to be one of the primary reasons that Arum struck an unusually conciliatory tone on Saturday. He urged the media not to lash out against Mayweather for failing to respond.

He speculated that the reason Mayweather may not want to make a decision yet is because his uncle, Roger Mayweather, goes on trial in a Las Vegas court room on Aug. 2 on charges that he assaulted a female boxer he once trained.

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