By William Shropshire: Manny Pacquiao’s promoter Bob Arum is expected to announce his fighter’s next opponent possibly by Friday.
It’s assumed to be WBO light welterweight champion Timothy Bradley (28-0, 12 KO’s) who gets the call by Arum after Miguel Cotto took himself out of the running choosing to fight WBC welterweight champion Floyd Mayweather Jr. after Cotto’s negotiation attempts with Pacquiao and Arum hit a brick wall with Pacquiao’s refusal to budge over 147lbs.
This made Cotto’s choice to fight Mayweather an easy one because not only will he make just as good money against him but he’ll also be able to fight at the full 154 pounds for the fight rather than having to melt down all the way to 147 to accommodate Pacquiao once again.
Bradley doesn’t bring a whole lot to the table for Pacquiao. He’s not a pay per view attraction, isn’t powerful, isn’t all that fast and doesn’t have great size. He’s just a good all-around fighter that gets the job done by hard work. Perhaps the biggest asset he has going for him is that he fights for Top Rank, so that it’ll be another in house fight for the company. It’ll be the equivalent of Pacquiao facing someone like Joshua Clottey in terms of fan interest.
I expect the fight do better than the 660,000 PPV buys that the Pacquiao-Clottey fight brought in but that’s largely because Pacquiao is a more popular fighter now than he was then. He’s gotten to the point where he can probably draw a 1 million buys no matter who Arum drags in to fight him from his Top Rank stable.
It is more interesting to see Pacquiao facing a new guy than in watching him fight Cotto again, especially if he didn’t have the option Mayweather. It would have been sad to see Cotto forced to melt down to 147 to give Pacquiao another weight advantage like he had last time they fought. Cotto, of course, would be too weak to fight and would take another beating but that’s how it goes.