Part 2 of a multi-part series.
One of the major disputes involving the two factions fighting over Manny Pacquiao is just what did the Filipino receive for stopping Marco Antonio Barrera on the night of November 15th?
Murad Muhammad tells MaxBoxing of the negotiating process that took place with Golden Boy Promotions, which had the promotional rights to Barrera and was the promoter for this event:
“He wants Barrera, we got get Barrera. So I call Richard Schaeffer (of Golden Boy Promotions), he said ‘How much you want, Murad?’ Because I gave a very high figure. He said ‘I’ll give you $350,000’. I said ‘I’m not taking $350,000’. He said ‘Well, that’s my offer.’
“So I call Manny Pacquiao’s people and said ‘Look, they offered us $350,000. You have to tell me how much money you want?”
“Manny wants $500,000,” was the reply from the management team, according to Muhammad.
“500,000!?!?” was Muhammad’s reaction to their demands. “Yeah, to fight Barrera we want $500,000.
“I’m saying in my mind, ‘Bernard Hopkins didn’t even make $500,000 and he signed to defend his title. ‘Smoke’ Gainer didn’t make $500,000, I’m going in my mind all the champions who never got to that figure, especially in four fights on TV. So I go back to ‘Golden Boy’. I say to Schaeffer ‘I want X amount of dollars’. He said ‘All right, this is my last offer, $450,000’
“I call back to Nazario (the business manager) and to my boxer Pacquiao, I said ‘Would you guys take less than five?’
“Nope. $500,000,” was the reply back to the promoter. “So I go back again and we fight, we fight back and forth and BOOM, I get $700,000!!! This is ALL before the fact. It ain’t like Manny Pacquiao got this money, HBO volunteered to give me this money. This was hard neee-goo-cee-acion. I’m GOOD at what I do!!! I make millionaires.”
“So we get $700,000, ‘Golden Boy’ will bear witness, they gave me a 25-page contract and asked me to have Manny and the manager sign it and I said ‘I will not do that, that’s an insult. That boy got to go to law school to read this’. I said ‘The Muhammad Ali law says that I have to show him all the money, it didn’t say I got to teach him legal terminology of what you and I got to do.'”
But why wouldn’t Pacquiao, like many other fighters making decent money, have an attorney look over his paperwork? It’s a standard practice in the business.
“So I get Manny to sign, he agreed I got $700,000, this is the breakdown of the money. BAM!!! He signs it, I attach it to the contract, we sign it. That’s four weeks prior to the fight. Then he signs a standing boxing contract because I got a license in Texas under my company and he says to me ‘Put $350,000 on it’ I said,’ OK, that’s fair’ because you can’t tax him on expenses.
“So I put $350,000. I said ‘By the way, you gotta give me back my $25,000 cash that I gave you. He said ‘OK, you’re right’. So I put that in the standing boxing contract. I said ‘Oh, by the way, you gotta pay that standing $20,000 if you want to keep this belt.'”
That belt would be the IBF junior featherweight title that Pacquiao holds. His fight against Barrera was at featherweight.
“So he said ‘Murad, do you think I should pay the money?’ I said ‘Let me say this to you, you don’t take a Bentley out of the garage and don’t buy insurance. This is insurance for you, you lose and you’re still the champ.
“So now you deduct $25,000, $20,000, that leaves $305,000. I sit down with the commission the morning of the fight and the commission says to me ‘Murad, these figures right in the contract?’ I said ‘Commissioner, where’s my name?’ He said “What do you mean where’s your name?’
“‘This says Golden Boy this don’t say M and M Sports’. He said ‘I thought you approved that?’ I said ‘No, no, no. There’s a discrepancy here or any controversy here, I got to come here and clear this up’. He said ‘OK, well, let’s write your name in here’.
So he writes my name in, he says ‘Well, you’re going to have to get Manny to sign it now that we wrote it in’. And that’s the contract that Manny signed the day of the fight. The exact same contract he signed four weeks prior to the fight.”
Muhammad claims that his fighter knew exactly how much he was to receive for facing Barrera. However, Roach disputes that claim.
“When Manny signed the contract to fight, the first contract, he signed for $300,000, because that’s what Murad offered him,” said Roach. “Muhammad did a deal with HBO for $700,000, he offered Manny $300,000. Manny accepted it. The thing was, when Manny found out at the weigh-in, when he had to sign the original contract that said $700,000, he wasn’t happy. And that’s when he came to me.”
But the promoter has a different recollection of the chain of events.
“He told me, out of his $500,000, he wanted $350,000 as his purse on the contract,” said Muhammad.
But Nick Khan, one of the attorneys brought in by Freddie Roach at the behest of Pacquiao, through their investigations were able to secure a contract dated on August 22nd from Muhammad to Pacquiao that clearly stated that Pacquiao was to receive $450,000. The contract is signed by the promoter, fighter and business manager, Nazario.
The agreement reads in part: “The purse to be accepted an paid to Fighter after the Barrera bout shall be in the amount of Four Hundred and Fifty Thousand U.S. Dollars.”
So what happened to the $100,000?
“That’s part of our questions,” Khan told MaxBoxing last week, while discussing the situation. “Amongst our many other questions, because the appearance of a reduction of at least $100,000 is dubious and needs further inspection.”
Khan was also able to provide a copy of the bout agreement from the state of Texas that does match the figures stated by Muhammad. But the deductions in the contract state that the $25,000 is for “training expenses” and the $20,000 is for a “special sanction” to the IBF.
It’s interesting that Muhammad said that the fighter wanted $150,000 taken off of his stated $500,000 purse for expenses. Right there it seems that Pacquiao had at least $175,000 in expenses. To put this into its proper perspective, Antonio Tarver, who recently earned about $1.5 million for facing Roy Jones in November, got $50,000 in expenses. And according to Khan, Pacquiao’s supposed expense money was never under his direct control.
“There’s a shanty of a motel in Hollywood called the Vagabond Inn,” Khan said of the motel that right next to Roach’s Wild Card Boxing Club. “I had seen Manny Pacquiao there, certainly not a nice accommodation, nevertheless, it’s close to the gym and it was convenient.
“After Manny arrived in L.A., I get a call from Freddie that Manny was eating horribly and was eating out for every meal because the motel had no kitchens in the room. [Freddie] told me that he wanted his strength coach, Justin Fortune, to prepare Manny’s meals. He wanted to know if I could help him get a place for Manny that had a kitchen.
“We did some research, made some calls, that day I called Freddie back that there was another place in Hollywood that was $400 more a month and it had a kitchen. Freddie took that information, gave it to Nazario. Nazario says he asked Murad about it, [Murad] declined to pay the additional $400. [Pacquiao] stayed at the Vagabond Inn.”
According to Roach, Pacquiao, had trained in Southern California for nearly two months in preparation for his bout with Barrera, with 10 members of his camp staying together in two rooms.
Another question that has to be asked is why did Pacquiao have to pay this ‘special sanction’ fee to the IBF? It wasn’t as if his mandatory was due for his 122-pound title. In fact, just recently has a purse bid been called for a fight with Jose Luis Valbuena, but Valbuena only earned the number-one position by stopping David Donis in nine rounds on October 23rd, about three weeks before Pacquiao faced Barrera. And the Barrera fight wasn’t even an official ‘title’ fight, since Barrera had no official championships to his credit at the time. What insurance needed to be taken out here?
MaxBoxing called Daryl Peoples of the IBF for an explanation but calls were not returned.
In a recent article penned by Ronnie Nathanielsz of the Manila Standard, it quoted Roberto Nazario, the son of Rod Nazario, that Muhammad had made about $140,000 to $150,000 for the fight. The article pointed out that Pacquiao’s gross purse was $700,000. The article reads: “In an exclusive telephone conversation with Viva Sports, Nazario said Murad deducted $200,000 from Pacquiao’s purse since he paid for the airline tickets and internal travel hotel accommodations and food and other expenses of his entourage, aside from paying the referee and judges of the fight.”
Later it reads: “The young Nazario disclosed that ‘from the balance of $500,000, 30-percent was set aside for taxes, which left a net purse of $350,000 for Manny’ as originally announced.”
It has to be noted that in boxing it is customary for foreign fighters to put a different – oftentimes lesser amount – on their fight contracts for tax purposes. But here’s the problem, Pacquiao, according to those involved, was set to receive $500,000 as his purse, never the full $700,000.
“It’s interesting that Murad Muhammad says ‘Look, $500,000 went to Manny Pacquiao, and after that $150,000 went to training expenses’ which would take Manny’s share down to $350,000,” points out Khan. “We know from looking at the bout agreement, there’s an additional $25,000 in training expenses. So Murad Muhammad is saying there is $175,000 in training expenses for Manny Pacquiao.
“The Nazario camp is saying ‘OK, it was 500,000 for Manny and from that 500,000 we conveniently took $150,000 and placed it into a separate account for Manny Pacquiao so we can pay his taxes. These taxes have not been paid. Two sides telling two separate stories.”
The story from the Manila Standard also says that “Pacquiao’s entourage was reportedly made up of around 10 people, seven of whom traveled from Manila. Based on his assessment, Nazario said Murad’s expenses amounted to around $50,000 to $60,000, earning Muhammad about $140,000 to $150,000.”
Earlier Muhammad had stated that Pacquiao had instructed him to put $350,000 on the final contract, since it wouldn’t be fair to tax him on expenses. But whose expenses and for whom?
Sources close to the promotion say that Pacquiao and his camp were in cramped quarters at the fight hotel, with up to five or six people per room. Also ‘Golden Boy Promotions’, which did not pay Muhammad for the fight – the $700,000 was provided directly to Muhammad by HBO – did provide airfare, hotel rooms and daily per diems for members of Pacquiao’s team.
The same source says that M and M Sports really didn’t do much of anything outside of showing up on the Friday night before the fight to promote Barrera-Pacquiao.
There seems to be a huge gray area in terms of just who was receiving the supposed ‘expense’ money, along with a bonus given to Pacquiao after his knockout over Barrera.
“It’s gray,” admitted Khan. “As is much of the situation in this case. And another thing that’s a gray area is the $60,000 bonus that we’ve heard about. Well, on one side of his mouth, Muhammad says it’s a $60,000 bonus, out of the other side of the mouth we know that it’s $60,000 that Rod Nazario was able to obtain from Filipino television rights.”
To Khan there is some funny bookeeping from two sides that need to get their stories straight.
“Roberto Nazario in that article from the Manila Standard says ‘Murad Muhammad had $50,000 in expenses, that’s why he only made $140,000 to 150,000’. Murad Muhammad is saying after the $200,000 I took, there were $150,000 in expenses. We know the bout agreement says there was $25,000 in training expenses. So it could be expenses anywhere from $150,000 to $225,000, if you believe Roberto Nazario.”
And that money seems to be unaccounted for. But regardless, the fighter, under the contract he signed, was entitled to $305,000. But that’s a far cry from what he actually took home.
“There’s a manager involved in his life Marty Elorde – the son of the old Filipino boxer ‘Flash’ Elorde’ who gets 30-percent of the 305,000, there is Rod Nazario, who claims to get 10-percent of the 305, there is Freddie Roach, who’s supposed to get 10-percent of the gross, which he thought was 305, and there’s Sydney Hall, who’s supposed to get seven-percent,” explained Khan, whose figures have been verified by other sources. “So all together we’re talking about 57-percent of the $305,000 going to people other than Manny Pacquiao. After you take the IRS into account, he’s not left with much.”
