By Rob Smith: Top Rank promoter Bob Arum says that Manny Pacquiao could make decision about his December 8th fight as early as today, according to the LA Times. The field has been reduced to two fighters – Tim Bradley and Juan Manuel Marquez – after Miguel Cotto dropped out of the race to take a December 1st fight against WBA World junior middleweight champion Austin Trout.
It’s unclear if Cotto was really ever a serious option because Arum and Pacquiao both wanted a catchweight of 150 lbs, and Cotto had already been the receiving end of one catchweight fight with Pacquiao in 2009. That one didn’t go too well with Cotto. You can’t blame him for not wanting to boil down a second time to accommodate Pacquiao on the weight requirement, especially after Floyd Mayweather Jr. agreed to fight Cotto at the full weight for the division last May.
Arum has all the important pay per view figures at hand and he’s discovered that “60 percent of the pay per view households are Hispanic” in the United States, according to the LA Times. This obviously is going to help shape his decision to likely go with Marquez as the one to face Pacquiao on December 8th. In reading a lot of the comments that Arum has made in the past month, it seems that he’s been dialed in towards a Pacquiao-Marquez rematch from the very start.