By Tim Smith, New York Daily News
Just when you thought boxing was about to get it right, and give sports fans the most significant match in the 25 years, it performed down to expectations.
Floyd Mayweather, Jr. and Manny Pacquiao won't be meeting in a mega fight in Las Vegas on March 13. The fight officially died over the weekend when Pacquiao agreed to fight Joshua Clottey at Cowboys Stadium. Mayweather is reviewing his options. In the greatest testament to how messed up the sport really is both boxers plan to fight in separate matches on Pay Per View on March 13.
How this happened is beyond the comprehension of anyone who hasn't ever spent a significant amount of time around boxings power brokers. The average person rightfully wonders why anyone would walk away from a $40 million pay day just because they don't want to take some random blood tests. That is what Pacquiao did.
You want to blame someone for killing the fight? Blame Pacquiao and his reps. Where else do you place the blame? You can scream that Mayweather didn't want the fight, but there wasn't anything to indicate that.
When Pacquiao and his reps included a potential deal breaking clause that would penalize Mayweather $10 million for every pound he was over the welterweight limit, he agreed to it. End of story. Mayweather was ready to sign the deal.
But Pacquiao became offended with Mayweather's clause that both fighters - and the important word here is "both" - agree to Olympic style drug testing, which included random urine and blood testing.
This was not a last minute clause that Mayweather came up with to try to scuttle the negotiations and get out of the fight. It was included in the initial proposal, as was Pacquiao's $10 million "fat" clause. But we didn't hear anything about this being a problem until Dec. 22 when word got out that the fight was in jeopardy.
Since then Pacquiao has waffled on just why he didn't want to take random blood tests and has even sued Mayweather and his camp for defamation.
In the current climate where every athlete who performs super human feats is under suspicion of being on performance enhancing drugs, the request for Pacquiao to take random drug tests is not so far fetched.
Mark McGwire's admission to using PEDs during his assault on one of the most hallowed records in baseball after years of denials makes Pacquiao's protests about being smeared by people's suspicions ring hollow.
To say that he has never tested positive for PEDs is not enough. Welterweight champion Shane Mosley has never tested positive for steroids in any of the urine tests that were administered by the Nevada and California boxing commissions. But he has admitted before a federal grand jury that he took a designer steroid called "the clear" and also used EPO.
Paquiao's promoter Bob Arum has been trying to bail on the fight for the last two weeks. He has consistently declared the fight dead, even as his stepson, Top Rank President Todd duBoef, was feverishly working with Golden Boy Promotions, the negotiators for Mayweather, to keep it alive. First Arum said he was going to put together a match between Pacquiao and Yuri Foreman, a newly minted 154-pound world champion who is also promoted by Arum.
Then this weekend he closed the deal for Pacquiao to fight welterweight Joshua Clottey, another boxer that he represents, at Cowboys Stadium on the March 13 date that had been set aside for Pacquiao-Mayweather.
This can't have been an easy negotiation for Arum. He was sitting opposite a pair of boxers that he groomed to become two of the biggest cash cows in the sport before they left him to ring up cash registers for themselves. That couldn't have been easy on Arum's ego. But I would hate to think that Arum undermined what was potentially the highest grossing boxing event in the sports history because of his dislike for De La Hoya, owner of Golden Boy Promotions, and Mayweather.
Strange things have happen in boxing, but not much stranger than the collapse of this fight that everyone was clamoring to see. In the end money wasn't enough to save it.
What we're left with is Pacquiao, a Filipino national hero, fighting Clottey, who hails from Brooklyn by way of Accra, Ghana in Africa, fighting deep in the heart of Texas. I could care less. And the sports world will shrug, because they don't know Joshua Clottey from Jacques Cousteau.
Cowboys Stadium would have been the perfect venue for Pacquiao-Mayweather because it is a sports event - the Super Bowl of boxing. Cowboys owner Jerry Jones has booked boxing's version of a preseason game in Pacquiao-Clottey.
Too bad, because the time for Pacquiao-Mayweather is right now, not September or December. To use another bad football analogy, by failing to get Pacquiao-Mayweather done boxing has fumbled the ball on the goal line going in. If Pacquiao loses to Clottey, no one will care if he ever fights Mayweather.
Source: nydailynews.com
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