Pacquiao: wants Mayweather fight
“I’m thinking that the fight will happen,” the Pac Man told Chris Wallace during an interview on Fox News Sunday. “So hopefully by…when we…within one week, though, we can hear from them and fix the fight.”
Is that clear?
By now the time spent going back and forth on the fight has made it into one of the most ballyhooed events of the 2015 sports calendar. Either they’ve increased the box office possibility with all the hype or turned fans off with all the negotiations and denials and urgings that seem to have gone on forever. But like the rest of us, Pacquiao, 36, wants an end to it and doesn’t want to retire without stepping into the ring with Mayweather.
“I don’t want that when I retire boxing and there is a big question to the minds of the fans,” he told Wallace. “I think the fans for me is deserving to see and watch the fight.”
Mayweather – Pacquiao fight hype
It actually hasn’t gone on forever of course but in a manner of speaking it has gone on, as your diehard boxing fan knows, since 2009. In fact, their failure to fight in 2010 was honored by Ring Magazine. Ring named ‘The failure to make Mayweather-Pacquiao’ its boxing Event of the Year for 2010.
Incidentally, it was not the first time, or even second time, Mayweather was part of the ‘Event of the Year.’ He was in 2007 for his fight with Oscar De La Hoya and again in 2008 for his retirement, which of course he’s come back from. He was also the magazine’s 2007 Fighter of the Year, a distinction given to Pacquiao in 2006, 2008 and 2009.
A fight that didn’t happen named as the fight game’s event of the year? If that is so, then if this one doesn’t happen it may make it as the boxing event of the decade, though admittedly there’s a strong chance it could be usurped in the 85 years the 21st century still has left.
For evidence the fight will happen, we have Pacquiao’s remarks above, but we also have the fact the two met in a Miami hotel room last week, the first time they’d physically met, and spent over an hour hashing things over mano a mano. Over the weekend Mayweather, 37, posted a video clip of him telling his potential opponent they can’t retire without fighting.
“You know, I congratulate him on his career. He’s had a wonderful career, and I’ve had a wonderful career,” Mayweather in the clip. “But, before we leave this sport, of course, we have to make this fight happen.”
Fight announcement Friday 13th?
Within a week suggests the end of this week, which happens to be Friday the 13th. Sounds apropos somehow. Top Rank promoter Bob Arum, who once worked with Money Mayweather but now works with the Pac-Man, said when the time came it would be Mayweather who would be the one to make the announcement.
Last week Arum, by the way, also spoke optimistically about the fight contract coming, just a few details left to iron out he told media on Feb. 6. So look for an announcement from Mayweather on Friday the 13th that the fight is a go.
Not that we’re betting on it.
