After spending the first six years of his professional career largely based in his home country of the Philippines, Manny Pacquiao and his management were prepared to spread their wings and come to America by the spring of 2001.
Rod Nazario was in charge of negotiating Pacquiao’s bouts in the United States. After several meetings with various promoters, he would run into Murad Muhammad.
“Manny Pacquiao’s manager, Nazario, had been in the country looking for a promoter,” recalled Muhammad. “He was disgusted. I got a call to go to San Francisco and go look at the fighter. I get on the plane, I go to San Francisco, the manager couldn’t see me. I’m waiting for him at 2 o’clock, 4 o’clock, 6 o’clock, 7 o’clock and the reason I had patience is cuz I’m watching tapes on this kid.
> “I was impressed when I saw these guys drop. He was hitting them with body shots and I didn’t know what in the hell they were falling for. So I said ‘Oh my God’. I discovered champions all throughout my career, everybody I sign, I shock the world with them. Whether it’s Mathew Saad Muhammad, whether it’s Eddie Gregory, whether is David Braxton, whether it’s James Scott, whether it’s Razor Ruddock – I always shock the world. Larry Holmes, when I brought him back, everyone thought he was through with Tim Witherspoon. So I spotted something that I could see, I could see a diamond in the rough. I said ‘I want this kid’. I was patient. 9 o’clock the manager showed up.
> “He said, ‘Well, why should I sign with you, when everyone has turned me down here in this country? I’m so disgusted’. I said ‘Well, I pull miracles’. He said ‘Excuse me?’ I said ‘I pull miracles’. He thought that was cute, so he said ‘OK, I’m gonna sign.’ He signs a year for $10,000 minimum.”
> Eventually Muhammad was able to get Pacquiao a fight on the Oscar De La Hoya-Javier Castillejo undercard at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas in June of 2001. ‘the Pac Man’ would proceed to gobble up Lehlo Ledwaba for the IBF jr. featherweight crown in six rounds. Pacquiao had burst onto the scene.
> “Now, this kid signed for $10,000, he made a lil’ under a $100,000 for a world title fight that I gave him in four days after signing, so that’s a miracle,” boasted the promoter. (Although, a copy of the Nevada State Athletic Commission bout agreement states that Pacquiao’s purse on that night was $40,000). “He’s the world champion. Now he makes a lil’ over a $100,000 to fight Agapito Sanchez.”
And this was when the first conflicts would arise in this union. In a rough and tumble affair, Pacquiao and Sanchez would fight to a six-round technical draw in San Francisco in November of that year. Soon afterwards, reports surfaced that Pacquiao had received just a fraction of the license fee from his promoter that was given to him by HBO, which televised the fight.
> “The writers write ‘Murad Muhammad received $500,000’ – and I don’t know how they received my license fees – ‘and he paid Manny $125,000 and he paid Sanchez $60,000. He went home with most of the money’. I said ‘Is this something?’ So I get a call from John Jackson (president of Forum Boxing, which promoted Sanchez) he said ‘Murad, the press is calling me’. I said ‘Why?’ He said ‘I did something I have never done before’. I said ‘What’s that?’
> “‘I told ’em how much money I got,’ is what Jackson said. I said ‘Why you got to do that?’ He said ‘Do you believe they say you got $500,000? They don’t know I got $250,000 of the $500,000, did they?’ I said ‘John, did you tell them that?’ He said ‘I sure did.’ What’s wrong with these people? I said ‘I don’t know what’s going on.'”
It was at that time that Pacquiao started to raise questions about his relationship with Muhammad and the stories of the fighter getting the short end of the stick started to become more and more public.
“So then after that, I get another call that Lou DiBella’s in the Philippines stealing Manny Pacquiao,” said Muhammad. “What the hell is this? So now I got a kid with a minimum of $10,000, that never got the minimum. He makes $80,000 and the 100-or-so- thousand, then a contract comes up for $2.1 million!!!!
“I go into New York and hired a gunslinger, cost me a great deal of money, and he sends a letter to Lou DiBella by his status. Lou knows that if I didn’t have a contract, he would not have taken the case. So Lou withdraws.
> “Now, Lou DiBella, all due respect, came to me personally and said ‘Forgive me, I made a mistake’. To his credit, he said ‘I was told that you’re bigger than that and if I ask you for your forgiveness.’ I said ‘Lou, it takes a man to say when he’s wrong. You’re forgiven.'”
Once again Muhammad seems to have a shaky recollection of events. DiBella never went to the Philippines, but he did have a meeting in Southern California after the Sanchez bout with Pacquiao, noted manager Gary Gittelsohn – who was brought into to look over the situation and possibly get involved in Pacquiao’s Career – Nazario and the manager’s son, Robert.
> When Nazario was given information regarding the license fees given to Muhammad and what the fighter should have received, Nazario was dismissive and disbelieving of the information he was given. Pacquiao would stay under the promotional umbrella of M and M Sports.
> “I begged Kery Davis (HBO Sports executive) to give me the undercard of Lewis-Tyson,” Muhammad said of the card that took place in June of 2002 in Memphis, Tennessee. “He said ‘Murad, I don’t know if I can.’ I said ‘You gotta put him on that card.’ He calls me back and said ‘Look, they’re talking abut three fighters, I might get you on but there’s no money.”
To Muhammad, being on this card was a ‘loss leader’, one where the exposure to a world-wide audience would clearly outweigh their relatively small purse.
> “Sure enough, they paid us peanuts, Manny, still makes over a $100,000 and we went and destroyed the fighter on the underneath card. So now everybody’s now pretty much talking about Manny but still we’re up and coming.”
> According to sources, Pacquiao made around $80,000 (before taxes and deductions from his purse) for stopping Jorge Julio in two short rounds. The next morning on the way back home from a Memphis airport, trainer Freddie Roach would call out to Gittelsohn, at the behest of his fighter, for assistance.
> From that point in early June of 2002, DiBella, who had just recently dipped his toe into the promotional waters, along with Gittelsohn, would do their best to break Pacquiao out of his promotional contract with Muhammad, which seemed to have run out.
> Throughout the better part of that summer, the drama was played out over Filipino newspapers and the internet. Marty Elorde, the ‘boxing manager’ of Pacquiao would openly advocate the fighter accepting DiBella’s multi-year $2.5-million offer. On the flip side, Nazario, who supposedly has a fiduciary responsibility to Pacquiao, would pledge his allegiance to the promoter. Accusations would fly from all sides, Elorde’s lawyers would send a termination notice to Nazario and also a letter to Hall advising him to stop representing Pacquiao in any matter.
> Elorde would also tell the Filipino management that he would stop actively participating in the fighter’s affairs if Muhammad continued to promote Pacquiao. He would also claim that Nazario had told him that he would sell off his 10-percent interest if DiBella became the fighter’s promoter. Elorde would admit that he had never even seen contracts for the fights with Sanchez and Julio. For a guy to collect almost a third of a guy’s purses, he may have been just as irresponsible as Nazario in performing his duties.
> But Elorde had made it clear that his fighter was a free agent. Even Nazario had admitted to the Philippine Star that Muhammad’s contract with Pacquiao had expired. DiBella had hoped to put Pacquiao on one of his HBO dates on August 17th.
> “I was approached by people involved with Manny who made it clear at that time that he did not have a contract with anybody,” said DiBella, recalling the episode. “He was a free agent, I pursued him and in the course of pursuing him, I felt there were a lot of ways I could’ve bettered his situations. But he wound up with the people that he started with.”
> Despite his calls for help, by early August, Pacquiao had patched up the relationship between Nazario and Elorde with the intervention of Games and Amusement Board Chairman Eduardo Villanueva. It seemed once Pacquiao had gone back to his homeland, that certain influences changed his ways of thinking. Where once Pacquiao reached out for help, calls to him soon went unreturned mysteriously.
> Soon DiBella would be out of the running and Muhammad would once again secure the rights to the southpaw.
“I was meeting walls and impediments everywhere along the way. Was I surprised by that decision? At that time I was surprised by the decision but at the same time, once that decision happened, then I normalized my relationship with Muhammad. He made a decision to stay where he was,” explained DiBella.
> Fast forward to this past November, where the question was posed once again, just how much did Pacquiao receive for beating Barrera? But just as importantly, what should he have received? Muhammad claims that his fighter was fully aware of what the money was for this fight and was satisfied with the amount. But once again, he was looking for some outside assistance.
> “The fight was on November 15th, which was a Saturday, on Monday morning I received a call from Freddie Roach that Manny Pacquiao wanted to meet with us because he had come to Freddie for help,” said Nick Khan, a senior associate in the law firm of Keith Davidson and Associates located in Beverly Hills.
> A cease and desist letter, which was signed by both the fighter and trainer was sent to Murad Muhammad on November 19th against the objections of Nazario. A similar letter was sent the next day to HBO by Davidson to HBO executive Xavier James and their lawyer Peter Mozarsky. Khan insists that all of these things were done at the behest and consent of Pacquiao.
> “It absolutely was,” he says, “and that’s exactly what Manny’s statement on November 19th, a signed statement by Manny Pacquiao, indicates and demonstrates.”
> And how did HBO react to the letters?
“HBO, initially appeared to accept the letter and were prepared to set up a meeting with ourselves, Keith Davidson, myself, Rod Nazario, Manny and Freddie Roach in New York, in terms of trying to get the next fight for Manny set up,” explained Khan, whose group had contacted promoter Russell Peltz to help them stage his future fights.
Eventually that meeting would be canceled as HBO would seek to get more information on the contractual status of Pacquiao and Muhammad. Did HBO resist a change in Pacquiao’s promotional situation?
“All I know is that they would not meet with us without Murad Muhammad there,” said Khan.
But the process of freeing Pacquiao was in place.
“We had done our research, there was certainly enough information to demand an accounting and to try and break Manny Pacquiao out of his contract with M and M Sports,” continued Khan. “On December 26th, a Friday, we FedExed to Murad Muhammad a demand for accounting on behalf of Manny Pacquiao as his lawyers.”
Khan would produce that document to MaxBoxing.
“On the 28th, keep in mind, the 26th in the States is the 27th in the Philippines. So on the 28th, within 48 hours, Keith Davidson received a fax from Rainier Madrid, who’s Rod Nazario’s lawyer. Madrid on the fax states to call him tomorrow on the 29th, ASAP,” Khan says. “We called him on the 29th, he said Rod Nazario needed to talk to us, we spoke to him with Freddie on the phone. Rod Nazario said everything was OK with Murad Muhammad and they were going to be staying with him until the end of the contract.”
> It seemed once again that once Pacquiao was in the Philippines his tune suddenly changed. History had repeated itself.
“When Manny’s over here, he stands up for himself,” says Roach, who has tried in vain in the last few weeks to reach his fighter. “But I think when he’s at home a lot of pressure gets put on him from the Filipino people and that Mr. Nazario has a lot of influence on Manny. I think it’s their decision, not Manny’s. Manny’s doing what he’s told. One of these days he’s going to have to be a man and stand up for himself or he’s going to end up broke.”
“I feel really bad for Manny Pacquiao,” adds Khan. “He has definitely been sequestered, he is incommunicado since we received this fax, no one has spoken to him directly. First of all, I hope he’s OK, second of all, it shows me that they had about five or six weeks to work on him in the Philippines and to let him know everything was OK, even though it wasn’t.”
You wonder, just who is Nazario working for, Pacquiao or his promoter?
> “Mr. Nazario seems like a real sharp businessman and nobody’s that naive,” says Roach.
“I think there’s a tremendous amount of influence on Manny from Rod Nazario,” adds DiBella. “I think Nazario has a very close relationship with Murad and I think that think things change dramatically (once Rod has Manny back in the Phillippines).”
> And for now, Pacquiao does have a promoter (one that he may not want) but no trainer.
> “Everything is in a holding pattern,” says Khan, of the current situation. “Freddie Roach has resigned as Manny’s trainer in disgust, contrary to any reports that have been printed in the Philippines. Freddie will not be training Manny and it’s not because he didn’t receive 10-percent of the gross. He’s not interested in that additional $35,000. It’s because Manny Pacquiao came to him, asked him for help, he got him help and all of a sudden, he’s been isolated and sequestered and not allowed to get in touch with anybody in the U.S.”
> Muhammad, who has one year left on his contract with Pacquiao has one thing in mind for the upcoming year regarding his fighter “In 2004, when Bob Arum, returns from vacation, my job is to put Juan Manuel Marquez in the ring with Manny Pacquiao.”
> It seems that this situation will always hover around Pacquiao. The forces around him may never allow him to receive his just rewards for his efforts. And until he ultimately stands up for himself, nothing will change. DiBella may have hit it right on the head, when after withdrawing his offer to Pacquiao in 2002, he would tell Secondsout.com “I don’t think this kid CAN be treated fairly.”
(In Part V, ‘Razor Cuts’, Steve Kim discusses why Muhammad’s relationship with Razor Ruddock ended.)
