As far as I see it, we are looking at Manny Pacquiao vs. Timothy Bradley 3 all wrong. Pacquiao?s fight with Bradley is a smokescreen that is just barely covering the ongoing battle that has been fought silently behind the scenes for the past few years.
The fight that is really happening is Manny Pacquiao vs. Bob Arum.
For anybody who has been really paying attention over the past few weeks, months or even years, Arum has held an iron grip over his Filipino moneymaker. He made it possible for Pacquiao to go on his now historic tear through the weight classes and reaped the profits on both ends by taking a percentage of Pacquiao?s purse and taking the money from promoting his in-home super fights. When he couldn?t get a foe ready in time, he simply just fleeced fighters like Shane Mosley and Juan Manuel Marquez for provisional deals just to fight Pacquiao.
The one thing Arum absolutely did not want under any circumstances was for Pacquiao to fight Floyd Mayweather. Since 2009, the objective was to minimize the fight in Pacquiao?s eye because the event would have to be co-promoted and a loss would certainly damage Pacquiao?s earning potential. However, with his career coming to a close and boxing taking a back seat to his political aspirations, Pacquiao finally put his foot down and forced Arum to make the fight?which he lost in miserable fashion.
It was not a fun time for Arum, who was as excited as a six-year-old waiting for a math test when it came to actually promoting Mayweather/Pacquiao. He was just as nonchalant about the fight afterwards, presumably because he already had an idea how it was going to play out and had no choice but to prepare for what was next.
From the standpoint of Arum, he is in a pretty shitty place in terms of the impending post-Pacquiao days of his company. A guy like Arum is old school and despite how loyal Pacquiao had been to him, it would come to no surprise that Arum would try to match him up as tough as he could once Pacquiao was giving him his two week?s notice. That guy was supposed to be Terence Crawford, but Pacquiao did something unbelievable.
He said no.
Because of his insistence to pick a more favorable match up, Pacquiao stuck to his guns and basically gave Arum no other choice but to make the Bradley fight happen. Even though Pacquiao has claimed he will retire after the Bradley fight, Arum has been defiant in going as far to say that he will not promote this as Pacquiao?s final fight, suggesting that he?s not ready to let Pacquiao go until he?s ready to let him go.
This was another public blow up in regards to the two, with one being Pacquiao?s outright refusal to Arum floating the idea that Pacquiao would never fight in Las Vegas again after the first Bradley fight to Arum calling out Pacquiao for missing out on therapy for his ?shoulder injury? sustained in the Mayweather fight.
There?s nothing sweet or admirable about it, but the whole reason Arum wanted Crawford from the get-go was to get Pacquiao beat and sell Crawford as the new face of his company. He couldn?t get the job done with Bradley twice, or Brandon Rios or Chris Algieri, and even if Bradley were to somehow win this fight, Crawford/Bradley doesn?t even make pay per view status on any network.
In the years that were wasted with almost endless posturing and fake negotiating between himself and Mayweather, those in the know always knew that Pacquiao was just a vessel of Arum?s will and he needed to put his loyalty and gratitude aside and remind his master who made him his money. Now, at the end of his career and an already depleted roster in desperate need of a new star, Pacquiao has done just that, and it seems bittersweet that this victory has come so late in his otherwise timeless career.
