NY Boxing Examiner | Michael Marley
No more histrionics. No mas with the promotional blather.
All the public wants to hear from the opposing sides, after they sit down at the Santa Monica conference table of familiar mediator and former Federal Judge Daniel Weinstein, is that the Floyd Mayweather Jr.-Manny Pacquiao fight has been made.
I told you on Saturday that "Frankenfight" had been jolted back to life like the movie monster.
(Click here to get the inside info on potential Pacquio opponent junior middleweight champion Yuri Foreman.)
Me, I’m not going out on a limb, really. I am just like the experienced weatherman who can see from the satellite charts that a cold front is blowing from Canada and that temperatures will be well below freezing.
So I predict that snow is coming. And the end of the snow job between Pacman promoter Bob Arum and Golden Boy’s Richie Rich Schaefer is near if not already here.
Let me put it another way. They say money talks, right, so it follows logically that $40 million for Manny and the same for the tax problem plagued Mayweather screams.
Arum wasn’t just whistling Dixie when he told me on his Saturday afternoon departure from his Cabo San Lucas “working vacation” spot that the opposing parties were ready for a sitdown in front of the highly persuasive Weinstein.
Don’t overlook the trust he has going for him on both sides of the table from his Solomonic settling of the dueling Pacquiao contracts issue a few years ago.
They can make this fight, they will now make this fight.
I think I will be attending a Money May-Pacman New York press conference next Tuesday or Wednesday.
Businessmen make deals and they don’t leave that kind of money on the table.
We need only look to the recent Fox settlement with Time Warner Cable to see how the big boys of business (do any of them live in a “Big Boy Mansion” like L’il Floyd?) make deals when it looks like the plug is about to get pulled.
Fox demanded one dollar per TV subscriber, a buck for every home getting its various video offerings. Time Warner Cable offered 70 cents less. Despite the huge gap in the demand and the offer, they made a deal at the 23rd hour, averting Fox disconnecting from Time Warner systems.
Is the Mayweather-Pacquiao fiasco any different? The ultimate settlement, in which Arum tries to completely get de la Hoya’s corportate hands out of Megamanny’s pockets, is Item B.
That solution can be delayed or deferred.
Item A, with the public appetite at an all time high, is making Floyd-Manny. It’s no biggie if the bout gets pushed back from March to May, maybe they will need the additional lead time, maybe not.
The only issue preventing the fight from being reduced to contracts is the random blood testing.
All they have to do is reach agreement as to a prefight cutoff date for such testing. Both boxers are already subject to random urine testing.
I mean, how difficult, how mind-straining can it be? Arum wants the last prefight random blood test to occur no later than 30 days before the fight, Mayweather’s team can counter with a 14 day, a 10 day or a one week cutoff date.
The ground is fertile for agreement because the earth is so rich.
Oh, yeah, lest we forget…there is one other nagging issue.
The lawsuit filed by Pacquiao in Las Vegas based on the unfounded allegations of drug cheating is not that problematic.
To get his mitts on $40, I am sure even a cursory public apology by the Golden Boys dumps that complaint into File 13 meaning the nearest wastebasket.
The preliminaries are finished, folks.
Maybe Weinstein can lock these egomaniacs into the conference room.
He can let them out when they yell, “We made the match!”
That’s a shout that will be heard round the world.
The love of money by all involved will crush everything else.
It always does.
Source: Examiner.com
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