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↵Manny Pacquiao can’t seem to keep his big mouth shut. ↵
↵First of all, he embroiled himself in a major controversy back in the Philippines by going on the television station ABS-CBN and announcing that his next fight would be broadcast on that network, an assertion that turned out to be in violation of his contract with the network GMA in partnership with Solar Sports. ↵
↵↵Now the fighter is undoing the best efforts of his team to pretend that they are completely uninterested in pursuing a Pacquaio/Floyd Mayweather mega-fight by openly stating his awareness that a Floyd fight is in his near future. ↵
↵↵“I think [Mayweather] is going to fight again. He’s not really retired,” Manny recently told MDS at FanHouse, and then went on to say, “For me, if I’m Floyd, I would fight a tune-up and then fight me. That’s for me, but I don’t know what his plan is. He might want to fight me right away.” ↵
↵↵This is all fine and good, addressing outright what many people believe to be the essential truth of the Mayweather situation in relationship to Pacquiao -- that he either will fight a tune-up in July in the hopes of taking on Pacquiao in the fall, or skip the tune-up altogether and just concentrate on making the Pacquiao fight. ↵
↵↵The thing is, the two main voices of Pacquiao’s camp -- his trainer, Freddie Roach, and his promoter, Bob Arum -- have been adamant that they are not interested in a Mayweather fight at all for Pac Man. Roach stated that he didn’t want a Floyd fight for Manny because Floyd’s defensive style was boring though admittedly excellent. Arum went even further, saying that he wasn’t seeking a Pacquiao/Mayweather fight because Mayweather is not a big enough box-office draw. ↵
↵↵My own take on these remarks is that they were the opening salvos of what surely will be a very difficult negotiation of the money split between the Pacquiao and Mayweather camps for boxing’s next superduper fight. Pacquiao recently demonstrated just how high his estimation is of his standing in the boxing world by shaking down Ricky Hatton for every last point on the package for their May 2nd fight to the extent of nearly scotching the whole event over a matter of peanuts. (Let me add here what many of us are all too often forgetting to mention when we speak of a potential Pacquiao/Floyd fight -- it is contingent on Pac Man beating Hatton.) ↵
↵↵As for Floyd, we know what he thinks of himself. The man refers to himself as “Money.” Enough said. ↵
↵↵So Roach and Arum both sent early messages to ole Cash Money May that basically amounted to, “look, don’t front with us, because even though you’re the biggest pot out there, we could decide to play other hands if you squeeze us too hard.” ↵
↵↵Which makes it kind of funny that Pacquiao, when asked, just puts it all right out there, basically saying, “oh yeah, either Mayweather will fight someone else and then fight me, or just fight me, everybody knows that.” ↵
↵↵As we all know, Manny is exceedingly well versed in the art of war. But the art of diplomacy? Not so much. ↵
↵This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.