LAS VEGAS – Floyd Mayweather Jr. delivered a fight night taunt to Manny Pacquiao by claiming he would tune in to a Lady Gaga concert instead of watching the Filipino star’s easy victory over Shane Mosley.
While Pacquiao was cruising to a comfortable points victory at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in a Showtime pay-per-view telecast broadcast, Mayweather was at his Las Vegas home watching Lady Gaga on rival network HBO – and urging his fans to do the same.
“Everyone watch Lady Gaga tonight on the best network in the world, HBO,” Mayweather said on his Twitter account.
Only Mayweather and his family knows if he really did watch the music special from Madison Square Garden instead of the showdown in the ring just a few miles from his home. Yet either way, his apparent ambivalence to Pacquiao’s win appears to suggest that a superfight between the pair – a bout that all boxing fans crave more than any other – is further away than ever.
Attempts to set up a Pacquiao-Mayweather fight collapsed in January, 2010, with the primary sticking point being Mayweather’s insistence on Olympic-style drug testing. Talks were set up again in July, but fell through once more, with Pacquiao promoter Bob Arum and Mayweather’s representatives at Golden Boy Promotions failing to reach common ground.
“For me I don’t care about that fight,” Pacquiao said. “I am satisfied with everything I have done in boxing. I want to fight because the people want the fight.”
A fight between the two biggest names in the sport would generate huge pay-per-view revenues and potentially give boxing a much-needed boost amid an increasingly tough sports marketplace.
Arum is in no doubt about what would be the outcome. “He would beat Floyd, I guarantee it,” Arum said. “You are watching a phenomenon. You are watching the greatest fighter I have ever seen. Nobody can compete with it. He will take every single fighter out of their game plan.
“The guy who knows that best is a real student of boxing named Floyd Mayweather Jr. He knows us and how we do things, if he had any desire to fight Manny he would call us. Mayweather has said that if he comes back he wants a tune up fight first. If he took that it wouldn’t be until next year that he was available.”
Pacquiao is instead likely to fight Juan Manuel Marquez next, although his continuing domination may be in danger of turning off some fans. Indeed, the champ was so confident of beating Mosley that he committed to performing in a concert at Mandalay Bay just a few hours after Saturday night’s bout.
Source: sports.yahoo.com
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