By Norm Frauenheim-
Manny Pacquiao’s return to the United States this week has a nostalgic feel. He stopped in New York. Then, Los Angeles. It was fun to see him.
That shy, enigmatic smile is still in place. His reunion with trainer Freddie Roach for a Jan 19 fight with Adrien Broner was the perfect touch, especially on Thanksgiving week. The family is back together. But I’m not sure it’ll mean much in a couple of months.
Does he beat Broner? Maybe. He’ll be 40 in a few weeks – Dec. 17. It’s tough to hazard a guess on how any 40-year-old fighter will do. Broner has speed and an overall skillset that Pacquiao didn’t see against Jeff Horn or a shot Lucas Matthysse.
But Broner also has shown – again and again – that he bails out at the first sign of adversity. Power is the last thing to go in any aging fighter. Pacquiao probably still has enough of that to force Broner into surrender or a hasty retreat into a scorecard defeat.
Then what? The widely-reported plan is for Pacquiao to then fight Floyd Mayweather Jr. in a rematch of their revenue record-setting bout in May 2015. Could it happen? Of course.
For Mayweather, celebrity and legacy are like T-shirts and caps. They are commodities, transactional in every way. He won’t turn away from a chance to cash in all over again. Reportedly, that’s what he and Pacquiao talked about weeks ago, supposedly in a chance meeting in Tokyo, where Mayweather’s on-again, off-again New Year’s Eve date with an unknown kick boxer is apparently on again.
By all accounts, Pacquiao is again in need of money. He reportedly earned between $160 million and $180 million for his decision loss to Mayweather in 2015. It’s anybody’s guess where all that money went within three-plus years. Bob Arum, Pacquiao’s ex-promoter, once said that the Filipino Senator was the Pacific Island nation’s only social welfare system.
To wit: He gives it away, apparently at such a rate he can’t even write a lot of it off. He has fought in the U.S for two years because of a reported IRS bill. Apparently, the IRS problem has been resolved. His spending habits, however, are still enough of question to wonder if he won’t still be fighting at 50.
Above all, there are reasons to think he and Mayweather have overestimated the market’s appetite for a rematch. It’s not as if the under-whelming first fight would ever sell a rematch anyway.
The other issue is that the overall market has changed. HBO is exiting after this Saturday’s telecast of Dmitry Bivol-Jean Pascal in Atlantic City. HBO, a key to Pacquiao’s international celebrity and huge purses, is leaving within two months of Pacquiao’s return. Gone are the nine-figure paydays.
Consider this: Terence Crawford, the best welterweight of the day, is earning between $3.0 and $3.5 million for each of his bouts under his current deal with Top Rank and ESPN. If that’s the new pay scale, Pacquiao can forget $160 million or $180 million. He has name recognition, but would anybody rank him among today’s five best welterweights?
On this list, Crawford is at No. 1, Errol Spence No. 2, Keith Thurman No. 3 and Shawn Porter No. 4. You could put Pacquiao at No. 5, but that would put him ahead of Horn, who beat him in a controversial decision. It also would put him ahead of Mickey Garcia, who is jumping two weight classes – from light to welter – to challenge Spence on March 16.
Garcia, who now has to considered at welterweight, never even mentioned Pacquiao as a possibility early in his dangerous pursuit of Spence. It’s not clear Pacquiao would have agreed to a date with Garcia anyway. But Garcia’s decision to bypass any consideration of the Filipino might say it all about what the market place thinks about Pacquiao’s value these days.
