GENERAL SANTOS CITY— “If there’s money to be made (in a fight),” said Top Rank promoter Bob Arum, “then we sit down and do it.”
This was the response by Arum to a question by a Manila-based scribe, who asked the seventy-something Harvard-educated lawyer the rationale behind the difficulty of pairing Manny Pacquiao with the super-featherweight division’s marquee names.
“We are professionals,” Arum said, stressing the fact that rival promoters like him and Don King “set aside differences so the public can watch top fighters go at it.”
Arum left for Las Vegas on Sunday after a four-day visit here to root for Pacquiao, who is running for a congressional seat.
Pacquiao is under contract with Top Rank, while most of the biggest names in the 130-lb division such as reigning World Boxing Council champion Juan Manuel Marquez and ex-titleholder Marco Antonio Barrera, belong to Oscar de la Hoya’s Golden Boy Promotions (GBP).
Instrumental in promoting Muhammad Ali in the 1970s and the likes of Sugar Ray Leonard and Marvin Hagler in the 1980s, Arum said that GBP has refused to do what he and King did, leaving the public drooling over the prospects of a rematch between Pacquiao against Barrera and Marquez.
With GBP hardly showing interest in seeing Pacquiao go up against Barrera and Marquez, Arum is looking elsewhere and in doing so ran into the people that handle another major player in the division, Dominican Republic’s Joan Guzman.
Guzman is the frontrunner in the race to face Pacquiao sometime in the first week of October in the US or in the scenic Canadian city of Vancouver in British Columbia.
Arum bared that the identity of Pacquiao’s next opponent should be known late this week.
Top Rank and GBP are battling in court over the promotional rights for Pacquiao.
The reason why Arum is said to be extending an olive branch to GBP is the impending result of the case that will favor the Los Angeles-based GBP, according to someone who is privy to the progress of the case.
“Arum has probably been told that they’ll lose the case that’s why he is trying to negotiate with GBP,” said the boxing man.
However, in the weeks leading to Pacquiao’s April 14 knockout victory over Jorge Solis at the Alamodome in San Antonio, Texas, GBP’s injunction bid was twice denied by a Nevada court.
