Calling all Ski Patrol and St. Bernards in the Greater Aspen, Colorado, area:
You and maybe only you can save the Floyd Mayweather-Manny Pacquiao megafight from crashing like that ski jumper on the famous open video montage of ABC’s “Wide World of Sports.”
It’s been a downhill trip for the muddled negotiations, due to issues arising out of how Manny and Floyd will be tested for drugs before the planned March 13 bout, but if you want to find a sliver of hope I can tell you that Golden Boy marketing maven is desperately reaching out to Top Rank president Todd duBoef in an apparent attempt to salvage the huge promotion.
We’re going from the dope to the slope in this soap operatic affair.
“Binkow is telling people he can’t find Todd right now,” a source close to the situation told me Monday afternoon.
“That may be true because Todd, who owns a home in the monied ski mecca, may be snowboarding or playing ‘Downhill Racer.’ Todd may be on the slopes doing his best Jean Claude Killy impression.”
Aspen (Uncyclopedia)
Binkow and duBoef have been doing the heavy lifting as Bob Arum and Richie Rich Schaefer, the lead dogs at TR and GBP, have been trading infective invective, most of it centered on Pacman’s refusal to submit to totally random blood testing.
In dope related news, it seems that Golden Boy is focused on the idea that, without blood testing being done at random before the fight, there will no way to “catch” Pacman using EPO.
“They’ve gotten off their harping on HGH and now it’s the EPO thing,” a second source said. “But Top Rank is citing some leading expert who they claim says unequivocally that the only way to detect EPO usage is by urinealysis and not through a blood exam.”
Arum, meanwhile, continues to want the media to play guessing games as to who the substitute foe will be on March 13 if Mayweather doesn’t consent to at random urine testing only.
Arum continues to toss out the names of Paulie Malignaggi and his own WBA junior middleweight champ, the rabbinical student Yuri Foreman.
But sources outside of Arum’s company say that Malignaggi is just having his name used and that Foreman is going to wind up fighting Miguel Cotto come June at Madison Square Garden.
Of course, all this is academic if the Ski Patrol and/or the St. Bernard snow rescue canines can locate duBoef before the next avalanche.
File this column under Mayweather-Pacquaio: Snow job.
