SAN ANTONIO--- Saturday night’s “Blaze of Glory” card at the Alamodome was supposed to supply some answers, but once again we’re left mostly with questions. The only certainty is that when the Pac-Man hits the campaign trail back in the Phillipines this week he will do his stumping with stitches in his left eyebrow.
A couple of days before Saturday night’s card promoter Bob Arum said he hoped to put together a Pacquiao rematch against Marco Antonio Barrera for the fall, as well as a fight pitting Juan Manuel Marquez against Humberto Soto, with the winners of those two bouts meeting early next year.
Immediately after disposing of Jorge Solis in the main event of Saturday’s PPV card here Pacquiao said he hoped to negotiate a November fight against Marquez. An hour later, at the post-fight press conference, he expanded the roster of potential foes to include Barrera, Soto, and WBO 130-pound champion Joan Guzman.
The curious aspect of all this fanciful matchmaking is that with one exception, all the names on Pacquao’s wish list are under contract to Oscar De La Hoya’s Golden Boy Promotions. The lone exception is Soto, and he will be fighting Pacquiao in June.
Bobby Pacquiao, that is. In a match that will officially be confirmed at a New York press conference Tuesday, Arum has matched Soto against Manny’s somewhat less-talented brother on the undercard of his June 9 Miguel Cotto-Zab Judah welterweight title fight at Madison Square Garden.
Although Arum and Golden Boy both have Pacquiao’s signature on promotional contracts, Top Rank appears to have the upper hand in the courts. (If Arum’s Pac-Man pact were less than rock-solid, rest assured that Saturday’s fight here would have been enjoined.)
Since Arum has thus far been upheld by the legal system at every turn, we initially found it somewhat curious that he would keep throwing out olive branches to Golden Boy CEO Richard Schaffer, urging him to come to the table and settle the dispute.
Why would a man convinced he was going to win want to settle? The answer should be self-evident: What will it profit Arum to come away with the rights to Pacquiao if Golden Boy has all of his most lucrative opponents locked up?
In other words, when Arum keeps tossing out names like Barrera and Marquez and Guzman he’s being neither fanciful nor disingenuous. He’s sending a message to Schaffer that says, in effect, “there’s plenty of money to be made for both of us, but we’re going to need to work together.”
The acrimony, however, is even more complicated. De La Hoya was for years promoted by Arum, and struck out on his own in part because he considered himself exploited. And Pacquiao is trained by De La Hoya’s current chief second, Freddie Roach, whom Arum blames for steering Pac-Man to Golden Boy in the first place.
“What did I do wrong?” asks Roach. “I didn’t sign the contract. Manny signed the contract.”
Roach, who flew into and out of San Antonio, spending less than 24 hours with Pacquiao this weekend, returned to De La Hoya in Puerto Rico Sunday afternoon. For the past month he has spent several hours a day in De La Hoya’s company, but all of their time together is devoted to preparing for Floyd Mayweather, not talking Manny-business.
“We’ve discussed it once,” said Roach. “Oscar’s not even thinking about stuff like that right now. He leaves it to Schaffer, and Schaffer doesn’t talk to me about it.”
Ironically, although it is Schaffer and De La Hoya with whom he is embroiled in the lawsuit, on a personal level he seems angrier at Roach than at either of his antagonists in litigation.
“Freddie used to be the nicest guy in the world, but he’s changed,” said Arum. “He’s not the same person.”
Arum continues to maintain that Roach attempted to deliver Pacquiao to Golden Boy as part of a quid pro quo, the payback for which was the $650,000 payday (which doubles if De La Hoya wins) he gets for training Oscar for the Mayweather fight.
“It’s just not true,” said Roach, whose word we value – and who told us the same thing months ago, even before the De La Hoya deal was consummated. “Oscar asked me to set up a meeting so he could speak directly with Manny, and I did that. I didn’t advise Manny, other than to tell him he ought to have a lawyer there before he signed anything.
“At that point (December) Oscar had already asked me about training him if Floyd Sr. didn’t, but that wasn’t unusual either. Oscar had spoken to me about training him for his last three fights. Nothing had come of it then, and I wasn’t sure anything would come of it this time. They were separate issues. One had nothing to do with the other.”
Arum, in the meantime, has other fish to fry. Judah’s controversial no-decision against the immortal Ruben Galvan Saturday night isn’t going to do a lot to build the gate for Cotto in June. One wonders, in fact, how the WBO can even get away with sanctioning Zab as an opponent in a title fight. (Judah will have had three fights in the previous two years, winning none of them.) If only for that reason, look for Top Rank to become a behind-the-scenes Amicus Curae in promoter Brian Young’s maneuvers to have the Galvan result retroactively changed to a TKO win – although it says here the Mississippi people got it right in the first place.
Who, by the way, does it say more about, Judah or ESPN, that the latest recruit to the Judah posse, suspended NFL star Adam (Pac-Man) Jones, wound up spending more time on television Friday night than Zab did?
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