If Floyd Mayweather Jr wants the mega-fight against Manny Pacquiao then he’s going to need to hurry up and finish the negotiations in the next three weeks, because Pacquiao’s personal assistant Michael Koncz is saying that the Pacquiao-Mayweather negotiations have until the end of the month before they go in another direction and start looking for another opponent.
With Koncz putting a deadline on the negotiations, it comes across like Pacquiao’s management are kind of calling the shots with Mayweather even though Pacquiao is clearly the B-side in the negotiations.
“We’re waiting for word from Floyd,” Koncz said via sports.tempo.com.ph. “The issue is very sensitive. We’re giving this until the end of the month.”
Giving it until the end of the month? Why would Pacquiao’s management set an early deadline on a fight which will give the aging Filipino fighter his biggest payday of his career and potentially reignite his deteriorating pay-per-view numbers. It doesn’t make sense for Pacquiao’s management to have him walk away from the negotiations when there’s so much on the line.
We saw Pacquiao quickly moved on and matched against Joshua Clottey in 2010 when the negotiations with Mayweather reached a stall over the blood testing.
Pacquiao’s promoter Bob Arum should have let the negotiations continue with Mayweather until they got an agreement. Instead we saw Pacquiao move on and face Clottey. There was nothing pressing about Pacquiao needing to fight Clottey because this is a guy who brought very little to the table and who had been recently beaten in his last fight by Miguel Cotto.
With Koncz talking deadlines, it makes you wonder how badly does Pacquiao’s management want the Mayweather fight? If they want the fight badly enough then they would be willing to extend the negotiations into February if need be. That makes the most sense. It’s not as if Pacquiao has a ton of options available to him for big fights. If he doesn’t face Mayweather in early 2015, then we’ll probably see Pacquiao matched up against Arum’s fighter Jessie Vargas. That’s not a great fight. In fact, I’d compare it to the Clottey, Brandon Rios and Chris Algieri fights for Pacquiao.