Manny Pacquiao?s promoter, Bob Arum, believes the prospect of a superfight with Floyd Mayweather has moved closer after talks with high-ranking CBS Corporation chief executive Leslie Moonves, and that there is a ?70/30 chance of it happening in 2015?.
Arum told Telegraph Sport that ?we are closer to the fight happening than at any time in the last four years?.
Pacquiao defends his World Boxing Organisation welterweight title here in Macao against American Chris Algieri in the early hours of Sunday morning. It will be the Filipino congressman?s 64th professional fight, in a career which has seen him secure world titles in eight weight divisions. Yet Mayweather?s name ? and vice-versa ? is missing from the resume, win or lose.
?If Manny Pacquiao gets past this guy, I’m very optimistic a fight with Mayweather can now happen,? added Arum.
?People have said this before, but I’ve had conversations before I left the States to come here which indicate to me that the chances of that fight happening are better now than they’ve been in years.?
?I’d say there’s a 70/30 chance of it happening now. Before I was always relatively pessimistic and said less than 50/50. But now, if I was a betting guy, I’d bet that it would take place.?
?We can confirm that Floyd Mayweather definitely wants the Pacquiao fight,? reported The LA Times, quoting a Showtime spokesperson. ?Everyone on our side ? Floyd, CBS and Showtime ? is advocating for the fight to happen.? Showtime are the boxing arm owned by CBS, which has a 250 million US dollar deal with Mayweather for six fights. His next contest, in May 2015, will be number five in that sequence.
It would be a travesty if the Floyd-Pacman fight were never to take place. Arum knows this. He has been promoting boxing for more than 50 years.
?It’s something that boxing has to be ashamed of if a fight like that never happens,? he told Telegraph Sport.
?I think that it will get done. Would I bet my money on it? No, but I think it’s more likely than not that it will happen.?
?When people write the history of boxing in our era 20 or 30 years down the line, they will blame everybody connected with the fight for the fact it didn’t happen. They’ll blame everybody.?
Apart from Pacquiao, perhaps? Arum agrees on this. Pacquiao told Telegraph Sport earlier this week that he is open to fighting Mayweather wherever, whenever. But he is not losing sleep waiting for it.
Nonetheless, ESPN.com were reporting that Mayweather-Pacquiao were not advancing, contradicting Arum?s assertions. ?The source of that has absolutely no idea about any of the negotiations that are happening. He has been expressly excluded by his boss,? added Arum.
Arum explained the backdrop to bringing Mayweather-Pacquiao to fruition. ?The first thing that had to be done was the networks had to find a way because Pacquiao is signed with Top Rank, which is signed with HBO, and Mayweather is with Showtime. They had to find a way to work together at that level to make it happen,? he explained.
?They’ve accomplished that. So there’s no longer a network problem. Now the fighters have to come together and work on the deal. The feeling was that if we sat down immediately to negotiate, there’d be so much animosity and it wouldn’t happen. Les Moonves, the chairman of CBS, has taken over the negotiations. He has negotiated with me on the Pacquiao side and we are close to reaching a deal on the Pacquiao side.?
For several years, boxing has appeared to be on one side or the other in the US, with a promoter/tv deal. It harks back to the promotional rivalry between Arum and Don King.
?There never was a Cold War (between Arum’s Top Rank and Golden Boy Promotions). You have to understand, this is all a media creation. It has nothing to do with Mayweather and that fight. The situation was that the American philosophy of doing business is to compete hard against your competitors.
?Compete hard, but essentially you look to benefit your company the most and you did that by trying to make the most money for your company. If you’re competing hard against your competitor, like Don King and I did, you come together from time to time for your mutual benefit. Now that’s the American philosophy. That’s how Americans do business.?
?In dealing with Golden Boy, we were dealing not with an American but with a European.”
Arum was referring to his bitter rivalry with Richard Schaefer, the ex-CEO of Golden Boy Promotions.
“The European way of competing is to destroy your competition. In other words, it’s an end sum game that you don’t win until you drive your competitor out of business. Richard Schaefer was determined to drive us out of business.?
?For that reason, he refused to do business with us because the end result that he wanted was for us to be destroyed and go away. That was the ‘cold war’. Once Oscar De La Hoya got rid of Schaefer, the Cold War disappeared because we always deal with other promoters.”
?The Mayweather-Pacquiao thing is different. Mayweather is ego-driven to a big extent and he wants to dictate terms. You have to deal with all of that situation.?
?The only way it could happen is to be dealt with on Mayweather’s side by the highest possible person ? someone he has great respect for, who I also happen to have known for years. He’s someone who is not going to lie to me and will deal with me honourably that’s Les Moonves.”
If Arum’s latest moves pay off, boxing fans – and the wider sporting world – can expect a genuine blockbuster in 2015. But first things first, Pacquiao must defeat the undefeated Algieri in this island off the South China Seas on Sunday morning.
