Showtime executive Stephen Espinoza has become the latest person to call out Top Rank’s Bob Arum for his statements regarding the Mayweather-Pacquiao contract.
Espinoza isn’t sure why Bob Arum and Top Rank have been leaking this information but he didn’t waste anytime clearing up the rumors.
“Signing what? No contract has been drafted yet. What the hell is everyone signing?” questioned Espinoza, before the executive was asked whether negotiations were ongoing for the proposed $250m clash. “Yes, we’re still trying to make the fight.”
When asked about Arum claiming they had signed a contract in principal Espinoza had this to say:
“You can sign a contract in principle? Must have missed that day of law school.”
The Mayweather-Pacquiao negotiations seem to get more difficult by the day. If it was only up to the two fighters I’m sure the fight would’ve been signed by now but the other aspects of boxing get in the way of that.
In an interview with FightHype, Espinoza went into further detail about Arum’s recent moves:
“To get to the specifics, Floyd isn’t holding anything up. No one is waiting on Floyd to rubber stamp or sign anything. Arum isn’t being truthful on this and he knows it. There is no contract that is awaiting Floyd’s signature and Bob Arum knows that. Floyd has been absolutely clear with all of us, with Leslie Moonves, with Al Haymon, and with me, that he wants the Pacquiao fight. That’s what we’ve been working on for weeks. We’ve made what I call significant progress, but there’s still open issues which have to be resolved…”
“A lot of the stuff that has come out from Arum is baffling to us. I can only guess as to what his motives may be. Maybe he thinks that this is creating some public pressure on Floyd to get the deal done, but the irony of the whole thing is no one needs to pressure Floyd. Floyd has wanted this all along. If people saw the terms that have been negotiated, it’s clear Floyd wants to make a deal. He doesn’t need this PR campaign to convince him that he needs to make the deal. He wants to do it for himself, for the fans, for the sport of boxing, and no one needs to pressure him into making that fight. Then you start to wonder if someone is consistently mischaracterizing the negotiations and trying to demean the other side, is that person really trying to make a deal? Someone who’s trying to make a deal doesn’t go out and publicly misrepresent what’s going on with the negotiations. It’s a complete mystery to us,” said Espinoza.
It looks more and more like we will see Mayweather-Cotto and Pacquiao-Khan in May instead of the biggest paying fight in history.