Hopefully a Pacquiao-Mayweather Dream Fight Doesn’t End Up Like Bowe-Lewis

In the summer of 1992 Evander Holyfield was under pressure to defend his title against a legitimate challenger because during the preceding two years Holyfield had defended against two men in their forties and Bert Cooper, a fighter who came into their bout with seven losses. In order to satisfy the sanctioning bodies as well as HBO, a mini four man tournament was set into place where the untested Lennox Lewis would face Razor Ruddock and Evander Holyfield would face Riddick Bowe with the winners to face each other.
On Halloween night in the fall of 1992 Lewis knocked out Ruddock in two rounds and HBO’s Larry Merchant declared, “We have a new era in boxing.” Then two weeks later, Riddick Bowe outpointed Evander Holyfield in a heavyweight fight for the ages. Directly after Bowe’s victory, Lennox Lewis and Riddick confronted each other ring-side and hurled insults at one another as Lennox challenged Bowe to an in the ring battle.
Now at the time Bowe was 32-0 and Lennox was 22-0 and the two had history together. Lennox had stopped Riddick in the finals of the 1988 Olympics and the two fighters had bad mouthed each other in the press for years. The match was a dream fight between two modern day superheavyweights who were both Olympic medalists and both undefeated. It seemed as if the stars were aligned for the fight to happen and that the winner would take the then incarcerated Mike Tyson’s place as the next great heavyweight.
Less than a month after Bowe won the title, he dumped the WBC title in the trash can and defended the title against Michael Dokes and Jesse Ferguson in two “give me-money” defenses while Lewis defended his title against Tony Tucker. Then the very next November, Bowe came in at his then career high and lost a razor thin decision to Evander Holyfield.
The public still clamored for a fight between Lewis and Bowe and it was tentatively scheduled for March of 1995, but in a mandatory defense of his WBC title, Lewis was knocked out in the second round by Oliver McCall, which forever obliterated the dream fight.
Now Showtime’s Al Bernstein recently stated that the fact that the sport’s top fighters didn’t face each other in the nineties led to the media’s desertion of the sport. And no other bout in the nineties exemplified this more than the proposed Bowe-Lewis clash.
A bout between Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao is a dream match just like Bowe-Lewis was. The stars are aligned and it’s a fight that the sport desperately needs in order to ride this new wave of popularity and exposure and it will be a travesty if the fight doesn’t happen.
Now there are hurdles to overcome. After developing Floyd and getting him valuable television exposure and providing him with a title shot before any other member of the 1996 U.S. Olympic team, Floyd constantly squabbled with the promoter and complained about his stature in the sport when in reality Arum had done a magnificent job in developing him.
Their relationship officially ended when Floyd exercised a clause in their contract that allowed him to pay 750 thousand dollars to break his contract with Top Rank so that he could land the big money fight with Oscar De La Hoya. Now you have to realize that Mayweather wasn’t a big ticket seller and Arum probably didn’t start making real money with Floyd until the time of their break up, which was right after his fight with Zab Judah. So in Arum’s mind he spent a lot of time developing Floyd and as soon as he was going to get a return on his investment, Mayweather left him high and dry.
As a result Arum is not going to want to work with Mayweather, but two things should and could change that. First Money makes people do a lot of things they don’t want to do and a Mayweather-Pacquiao match is the biggest fight that can be made in the sport today. Hall of fame referee Richard Steele recently noted that the bout would “without a doubt be the biggest money fight in history,” and revenues exceeding one hundred million dollars should bring the two parties to the table.
Secondly Pacquiao doesn’t work for Bob Arum, Bob works as his promoter and if the Filipino legend is adamant and insistent about a fight with Mayweather he can pressure Arum into making the fight.
Still there are other barriers in making the fight such as Floyd’s giant ego, but after Pacquiao’s recent success, it’s obvious that there should be a 50/50 purse split. Even Floyd Mayweather’s uncle, Jeff Mayweather recently opined that the purse split should be divided equally as did HBO’s Jim Lampley at the end of pay per view telecast on Saturday.
So let’s hope that the boxing powers that be get together and make this fight a summer boxing extravaganza because the sport can’t afford to let another great fight fall to the wayside like it did with the Bowe-Lewis dream fight in the nineties.

Notes:
I bet on Miguel Cotto this past weekend and Manny Pacquiao made me eat my ticket stub. I couldn’t fathom how a man who had his prime at featherweight could defeat one of the best welterweights in the world. I always though Ricky Hatton was overrated and thought De La Hoya was dead at the weight, but I can’t keep making excuses for Pacquiao’s opponents. With wins over Barrera, Marquez, Morales, De La Hoya, Hatton, and Miguel Cotto to go with titles in seven weight classes, you have to consider the Filipino juggernaut to be one of the twelve greatest fighters in the history of the sport. If he can beat Floyd there would be an argument for him to be placed in the top three. The Pac-man is just incredible.