These two and their promoters just drive me up the wall. Floyd Mayweather, Jr. won’t go to jail for smacking around his baby mama until June, in what is a miscarriage of the whole idea that celebrities don’t deserve special treatment that we’d been sold on by the judge. Gross. But even though Manny Pacquiao COULD fight in May when Mayweather was going to be in jail, now his promoter says Pacquiao can’t fight until June because of cuts that don’t take SEVEN MONTHS to heal. Uncool. According to Bob Arum, Mayweather doesn’t do any business in Las Vegas, even though the gates say otherwise to such a large extent you have to wonder whether Arum really did go to Harvard. Goofy. This fight won’t happen, even if Arum says it can happen in November, until one side or the other is absolutely convinced that they’ve gotten so old that they’ll lose to some schlub, so why not lose to someone who can make you more money? And then, it’s only a “unlikely maybe” at best.
That leaves us with Pacquiao maybe fighting Juan Manuel Marquez again next, the fight I’m most interested in for him if not Mayweather, or he could fight Timothy Bradley (a distant second for me), or Lamont Peterson (a distant third), or Miguel Cotto (a remote-as-Pluto fourth). And Mayweather could be fighting Saul Alvarez, a fight that interests me not in the least, or Robert Guerrero, a fight that interests me less than not in the least. All this makes me want to take my ball and go home.
There are other fights that are actually in the works, so let’s talk about those. We’ve got the people in the headline, along with Denis Lebedev, Rico Ramos, Amir Khan and others.
Round And Round
But, first, yes, let’s talk about some more fights not happening. Might as well get the depressing part over with. Middleweight champion Sergio Martinez’ team made a big fuss about rebuffing the WBC and HBO over not getting a Julio Cesar Chavez, Jr. fight, then rather immediately backtracked. It was a hissy fit without conviction. Martinez has an argument about being mistreated by the WBC, of course, since they’ve been promising him a shot at Chavez for forever, and they’re again saying it’ll be next, but whatever. Martinez should know better than anyone else how the WBC can mistreat someone, because he’s been getting it from them for years, but he keeps going back. You do it to yourself, Sergio, you do, and that’s what really hurts, is you do it to yourself, just you, you and no on else. As for HBO, he’s got no argument there. Martinez doesn’t exist without HBO, not in his present form. Yes, at times they’ve jerked him around, but they are still paying him out of proportion with what kind of live draw he is (because he does have a history of pretty good ratings, mind you) and he’s gotten paid well for two less-than-ideal opponents out of HBO in a row, and without HBO he doesn’t get paid much of anything to fight — maybe back in Argentina, but that’s it.
Amir Khan’s promoter Golden Boy has discussed the idea of a rematch between the junior welterweight and the man who first defeated him as a pro, Breidis Prescott, but now they’re thinking that a mandatory rematch with Peterson will be ordered due to the judicial interference of a “mystery man” identified as IBF official Mustafa Ameen. They also think that fight will be ruled a no contest, which strikes me as unjustified unless Ameen was determined to have actually rigged the cards. I prefer Peterson-Khan II over both Prescott-Khan II and Pacquiao-Peterson, which, just a guess, the latter is an idea Arum has only thrown out there to muck about with the plans of rival Golden Boy.
