Bert Sugar: earning power could deter Mayweather-Pacquiao being made -- Telegraph

By Gareth A Davies, Telegraph.co.uk

It’s hard to disagree with Bert Randolph Sugar about anything on boxing. Let me re-phrase that. It’s hard to disagree with Bert about anything. He doesn’t let you. There’s no time. He’s onto the next story, the next joke, the next fight, his next book, and the next passer-by who wants their photo taken with him. Legend.

Sugar, a graduate of the University of Michigan Law School, with an MA in Business, has wound up writing about boxing for almost six decades. It started for him with Joe Louis for a local paper in Washington. He’s now 74 and going so strong that when he’s on a roll, he’s a runaway train.

I wouldn’t like to argue with him about boxing. He’s forgotten more things about the sport than I have ever learned, or will ever learn – and he also sparred with Muhammad Ali (then Cassius Clay) as a teenager…I digress (I’m suffering from Sugarism). Well, actually Bert says as a College boxer he was known as the ‘Great White Hopeless’.

There is a point to this piece. It’s not just a eulogy to Sugar, boxing and writing historian, bon-viveur, raconteur and most importantly, a great friend to spend time with around the big fights. He made the point in the bar in the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas last night. It is this…with the amount of money Floyd Mayweather is set to earn for his night’s work against Shane Mosley (around 58.5 million US dollars if pay-per-view buys on Home Box Office reach 2 million), should he win, it may make negotiations for the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight impossible.

Bert is in the press room day in day out, working for HBO, with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the sport, taking on endless interviews and radio appearances as seamlessly as a jacket crumpling into a suitcase. “Besides the obvious bad blood between them and I say that literally and figuratively, the hurt from the fact that it was alleged that he was on steroids, I can now see the monies that Floyd will generate from this fight, the empowerment he will feel as the all-time biggest generator of money, in his mind’s eye he can ask for more than 50 per cent of the purse, and I can see that as a deterrent to the fight being made. I can’t see the fight being made for that reason. He needs this fight with Pacquiao like Imelda Marcos needs another pair of shoes.”

Source: blogs.telegraph.co.uk