Sports Radio Interviews

Pacquiao vs. Margarito in Mexico?

Instead of blindly shipping your pay per view provider $54.95 ($64.95 should you require any sports viewing be done in high definition) for the Manny Pacquiao vs. Antonio Margarito fight scheduled for November 13th, why not just send me five bucks and I’ll tell you what’s going to happen right now. Did you see Cotto fight Pacquiao? If so, fast forward through the first three rounds in your memory bank and press play. Margarito might be a tad bigger than Cotto, but he’s even slower. He’s tailor made for Pacquiao.

The intrigue of the fight is the location. Every where from Abu Dhabi to my backyard of Key Arena in Seattle have been mentioned as possible landing spots. Why stop there? Why not propose this fight take place on the moon? That might at least make it somewhat interesting. Call me bitter, but without Floyd Mayweather on the other side of the ring, Pacquiao fights seem much less appealing. While Manny is hardly to blame for the impasse in negotiations, boxing is seriously tarnished by the lack of truly great fights between superstars in the past 10 years.

While I sense the majority of sports fans could care less about boxing at this point, the small minority of us who still care are hoping that Mayweather will actually come to his senses and stop ducking what would be the biggest fight since Mike Tyson laced up the gloves against Evander Holyfield.

Bob Arum joined Into the Night with Tony Bruno late last week to shed some light on the negotiations that broke down with Mayweather and where Manny’s possible fight with Antonio Margarito.

On if the fight with Margarito would happen here in the U.S., or in Mexico:

“I don’t know exactly where the place is. Monterrey Mexico is one of the sites. Cowboys Stadium in Dallas is another. The Key Arena in Washington State, or Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City.”

Arum was asked about the comments Pacquiao had made regarding wanting the fight to take place in Mexico:

“Well, Manny is leaning towards Mexico. One of the reasons of course is that if he fights in Mexico, he’s not subject to U.S. taxes, so that’s an incentive on his part, but we’ll see. We haven’t arrived at our choice for a site. All we’ve determined is that Manny will fight Margarito on November 13th.”

On why the Pacquiao Mayweather fight didn’t happen:

“Well, we negotiated for two months through Ross Greenburg (President of HBO Sports) and through a man, Al Haymon, representing Floyd Mayweather. It only awaited Floyd’s approval. Then, when Floyd’s approval wasn’t forthcoming, Manny wanted to fight in November so we had to choose another opponent. Then all of the nonsense started from the Mayweather camp. You would think that if he had no intention of fighting Manny this year, he would have said it. He could have made a statement, saved everyone all of this trouble, say ‘look, I had this fight with Mosley in May and I want to take the rest of the year off, and I’ll fight Manny next year’. Instead, we had all of this drama and name calling. It was stupid. It’s totally, totally non-productive. But, you know, that’s Floyd Mayweather. He lives in a world where he only considers himself and doesn’t consider the other people. That’s the only explanation that I have. What happened was just totally and completely ridiculous. If Floyd decided that he didn’t want to fight again this year he should have just have said it.”

Arum was asked why Margarito is a good opponent for Pacquiao, even after Margarito’s license suspension for illegal hand wraps and if he sees Margarito having any trouble renewing his license in the U.S.:

“There are a lot of states that have said they would license Margarito and he’s applied for a license in California, even though he has no intention of fighting in California. I’m not concerned about that. I know what the record says and a lot of people making accusations haven’t looked at the record. The record states that Margarito knew nothing about the pads that are inserted in the hand wraps, and by the way, pads are always inserted into hand wraps. These pads had a substance on it that made them appear to be hardened. They were not plaster of paris pieces. California’s own Bureau that examines hand wraps did not allege that this was plaster of paris. So a lot of this stuff is made up. Now, Margarito is much taller, much bigger than Pacquiao. He’s the kind of fighter that comes ahead and fights like a tornado. In my opinion it’s going to be a great exciting fight.”

Listen to the audio here.