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Bob Arum
is largely credited for honing raw potential into ring
legends by featuring them in marquee matchups he deftly
set up through his Top Rank Inc. outfit.
Now,
he’s doing the same thing with Manny Pacquiao. He’s
setting him up for one blockbuster bout after another
and he bets that, in no time, the Filipino will be
immortalized.
 “I
really think, to be honest, we’re in the middle of
seeing the building of an edifice that isn’t finish
yet,” Arum said in an interview on dzSR’s Sports Chat.
“I’m
very confident that the next two or three years Manny
will establish his real greatness. I think the best is
ahead of him,” the 76-year-old promoter icon.
If
Pacquiao isn’t great already in his own right, only
somebody with as keen a boxing eye as Arum will know.
Arum
helped the likes of Michael Carbajal, Erik Morales and
Oscar de la Hoya turn from good fighters into household
names and then into legends as their careers drew to a
close. He set up superfights like Hagler-Duran,
Hagler-Hearns, and Holyfield-Foreman, giving fight fans
across the world the matches they wanted.
Pacquiao’s status as a certified great accelerated when
he hooked up with Arum, taking on Marco Antonio Barrera
and Juan Manuel Marquez recently and then Arum boy Diaz.
In
Pacquiao’s lightweight-title fight on June 28, Arum said
he expects interest to overflow.
“For the
pay-per-view, everybody’s predicting very, very strong
sales,” Arum said, adding that the Pacquiao-Marquez
rematch earned 400,000 pay-per-view buys, the first
match in a lower weight division to hit the mark.
“We have
been building Manny’s fights,” he went on. “It’s the
first fight to do over 400,000 in the lighter weight
divisions in history and we’re building on that and the
next goal is to reach the 500,000 mark.”
In the
coming weeks Arum will be bringing Pacquiao to San
Diego, their third stop of a grueling promotion of the
card called “Lethal Combination.”
“The
results we’re having so far are phenomenal. We’re really
out there promoting the event. It’s getting a lot of
interest,” said Arum. “Ticket sales are very, very
strong. We expect over 10,000 people. The capacity [at
the Las Vegas hotel Mandalay Bay] is about 11,000.”
Diaz was
crowned the regular World Boxing Council (WBC)
lightweight champion when he outpointed Morales in their
12-round encounter in August. Prior to that, Diaz
captured the interim belt with a 10th-round technical
knockout win over Jose Armando Santa Cruz in August
2006.
Diaz, a
31-year-old southpaw with a 34-1-1 record to go with 14
knockouts, will defend that same WBC belt against
Pacquiao on June 28 in Las Vegas.
“David
Diaz is a young man I consider an overachiever,” Arum
noted. “That means that he is able to achieve things
that are greater than his ability. In 1996, he made the
US Olympic team when nobody gave him much of a chance.”
Pacquiao,
29, (46-3-2, 35 knockouts) recently won the WBC
super-featherweight crown via split verdict over Marquez
in March.
The win
made Pacquiao the first three-division world champion in
Asia, after also holding the titles in the flyweight and
super-bantamweight divisions. |
